Does Your Job Make Your Body Hurt?
Here are three small but mighty adjustments that make a difference
I paid for college, sort of, by working for a swimming pool company. I remember wrapping arms around rolls of sod and dirt and duckwalking them to the bare ground next to the newly built pool. Unrolling and tucking the turf gave a satisfaction akin to making a bed, except that in this case I was making a lawn.
One afternoon, though, I came home from sod-rolling with a burning eye. I ogled my iris in the bathroom mirror, pulling my lid one way and then another. I couldn’t see anything. The next morning, my optometrist located an infinitesimally tiny speck of glass on the curvature of my eyeball. Who knew grass could toss up glass?
Spotting the physical costs of everyday work feels like trying to find a sliver of glass in your eye. The good news is that coping means making similarly tiny adjustments.
If you’re one of the many new subscribers arriving these days, welcome to the Mode/Switch Community! Longtime readers will know that, so far, this newsletter hasn’t talked much about work’s physicality. I’ve discussed body size and professional success. I’ve talked about sexual harassment. But I haven’t really talked about what work does to your body.
Maybe that’s because, in an area of hybrid work, I assume that people don’t need to think about the physical effects of work. Geez, you’re in your own apartment. Maybe your house cat attacks your stockinged foot now and then. But that doesn’t exactly warrant worker’s comp.
Still, work can wear you down in all sorts of ways. And I’m not even talking about jobs that feature yelling and threats of violence. Many jobs have less dramatic but no less consequential pains. According to some studies, 62% of American workers suffer neck pain at the day’s end. 12% of workers describe pain in their hands.
So this week, I’ll recommend three practices to help when your job hurts: scrutiny, anticipation, and synchrony.
Scrutinize the tiny actions that constitute your work.
The painfulness of work is strange—not least because most of us work in the knowledge economy, doing jobs that don’t seem to involve our bodies much at all. But as Richard Lanham notes, the chief commodity of the knowledge economy is not information; it’s attention. And attention, believe it or not, is pretty taxing, especially when it comes to “zoom fatigue.”
As one Mode/Switch reader wrote in to say, “After a day of 4 zoom calls one morning, I was so physically exhausted but hadn’t done anything physical...”
We can all sympathize. But the reader isn’t precisely correct. She was doing a lot of physical actions. She just wasn’t noticing them.
In article called “Nonverbal Overload,” the social scientist Jeremy Bailenson examines what exhausts people in online meetings. The first has to do with eye contact.
When I step into the break room to get my lunch from the fridge, I say “Hey” to people but then avert my eyes. It would be weird to stare deeply into my coworker’s souls while they wait for the microwave to heat last night’s spaghetti. You probably do this eye-avoidance, too, in elevators, committee meetings, hallways. Physical space permits intermittent eye contact. But in the zoom room, Bailenson points out, we’re forced to face other people’s gazes. That’s exhausting. To make matters worse, we often resort to Zoom-room nonverbals—nodding vigorously, smiling hugely, waving weirdly. Bailenson adds that we also tire ourselves out with constant self-monitoring. Sometimes Zoomers suffer claustrophobia, trying to remain in the frustrum of the webcam. You feel cornered just trying to keep visible to your laptop camera.
No single one of these micro-actions is excessively tiring in and of itself. But their cumulative effects are. Hence, my recommendation that you practice a kind of scrutiny for the tics your tasks require.
Anticipate tiny fixes for problems that you don’t suffer yet.
While writing this, I reached out to a Mode/Switcher who runs a ceramics shop in southeastern Michigan. Forming lovely objects in clay is a deeply centering work. But it can also be hard on the body. “I haven’t had shoulder pain,” she told me, “but I know that many potters, with decades of work under their belt, do.”
My friend suffers from arthritis in her right hand, a condition that worried her when she launched her studio. She feared that at some point her “wrist would just say ‘no.’”
You’re likely not among the 43,000 potters in the United States today. But even if you don’t do anything but manipulate a mouse and keyboard, you can follow my friend’s advice. (Here’s a cool 6,943-person study on computer impact on wrists and elbows.)
When she was most anxious about how the work would affect her arthritic hand, she pictured in her mind’s eye going to a few therapists she knows who are skilled at helping people with occupational troubles. My friend imagined sitting down with these therapists, showing them her hand. She envisioned how they would prescribe the needed exercises. She saw her own healing in advance of her pain. And this act of imagination helped give her the courage and resilience she needed to stay at the potter’s wheel.
But using your imagination can also help you make the small preventative adjustments that heal pain. Imagination, in other words, can intensify your predictive and preventative powers. My friend noted that she has learned to work clay differently than other potters. “It takes one extra movement—my left wrist does a job my right wrist ‘should’ be doing—but that extra second means I can do what I love.”
What I love about this story is the way this Mode/Switcher unites the power of imagination with the demands of craft to anticipate problems yet to arrive.
Synchronize your experience with that of others
When I worked as a radio deejay for an Upper Gulf Coast station, I had to stick close to the mic to cut down on ambient sounds. But some days the mic would be supercharged with static causing electricity to arc from my mic and to my mouth. It made me yelp.
But if you’re among the nearly 40% of American workers who suffer chronic pain, you have to do much more than yelp. You have to find ways to communicate your experience to people who can help you make small adjustments to your work.
Such communication can be deeply difficult. It’s hard for you to admit pain, and it’s easy for your supervisor to gaslight. Philosophers refer to “the problem of other minds” to describe the simple fact that everybody can see your behavior—but nobody knows what it feels like to be you. But that’s not only the only thing that makes it hard to communicate about pain.
Charles Duhigg’s recent book Supercommunicators notes that, at any given moment, you believe you’re having one kind of conversation with your boss, while your boss thinks you’re having another. Duhigg identifies three kinds of conversations:
Emotional: you’re releasing feelings.
Social: you’re saying something about the relationship.
Practical: you’re trying to figure something out.
When you start talking about workplace pains, your boss may interpret the conversation as an emotional release. She may try to therapeutically handle you (an emotional conversation). And if you don’t respond well, she may think you’re judging her leadership skills (a social conversation). So it helps if you say simply, “I need to have a problem-solving conversation.” Identifying the kind of exchange you’re hoping for will help you and your supervisor conspire towards small, meaningful, and practical changes in the work situation.
Morph your mode, mitigate your pain
Somewhere between your body and your task is a zone that’s partly posture and partly feeling. Call it your way of being with your work. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call it your habitus. This newsletter calls it your mode.
But whatever you call it, this is the zone where the hurting happens. But by scrutinizing, reimagining, and synchronizing your modes, you can lessen your pain.
Usually, this newsletter recommends ways to switch your mode. When it comes to physical pain on the job, though, you can’t toggle it off. But if you can’t switch your mode to fix your pain, you can still make tiny adjustments to make a difference.
Sometimes, it’s really simple stuff. Find a ten-minute yoga video. Get up to look out a window for sixty seconds. Rig up a standing desk. Taking a noontime walk in a nearby park. Adjusting your chair every twenty minutes. I know a corporate manager who takes a ninety-second jog in front of her workplace.
My friend the ceramicist notes that any practice like this “maybe feels obsessive—or maybe it’s just your body asking for what it needs.”
