5-minute read
Do you sit at a desk 8-10 hours a day? Your body is aching to move.
By mid-afternoon your shoulders have found their way up to your ears again. There is a spot at the base of your neck that you keep pressing. Nothing has happened to you. You’ve been sitting, typing, reading, answering, and by the time you close the laptop, there is an ache all over your body that makes you feel much older than you are.
Many of my clients in Berlin come to me with some version of this. Most are desk workers without any particular injuries, but regularly struggle with painful tensions. I remind them that it’s not necessary to put up with this discomfort, and there are some simple steps to start unwinding a stiff situation.
First let’s understand what is happening behind the pain.
Holding a position is work
When you stay in one shape for a long time, hunched toward a screen or curled around a phone, certain muscles stay switched on to hold you there. They are not moving, but they are working. Postural muscles are built for exactly this and they are like silent heroes, which is part of the difficulty: without much complaint, they will keep going long after you would have noticed the strain of 10 push ups.
If we zoom in on a physical level, we would see that the tissues simply become under-circulated and overworked when we stay in the same posture for long hours.
Prolonged muscle contraction presses on the small vessels running through the muscle. Blood circulation slows. Oxygen and nutrients arrive at a trickle, and the by-products of all that holding work take longer to clear out. Over an afternoon this registers as heaviness. Over weeks and years it becomes the thick, tight, aching stiffness that we are all familiar with.
Your nervous system becomes habituated
Muscle is only part of the story. It’s the nervous system that senses and moves the body.
When muscles stay tight for a long time, physical and chemical changes (caused by eg. lower blood flow and waste build up) signal the nerves to become more sensitive. For some people, this would show up as discomfort, or pain.
It could also go the other way. Muscle tension can compress the nerves, which then stop reporting much at all. You lose the fine detail of what your right shoulder is doing, and because you cannot feel it, you cannot adjust it. This group of people tend to delay seeking support until they notice sharper symptoms, like tingling down one arm, stabbing pain in the neck, a headache that starts behind the eyes.
You are not broken
Circulation has been restricted for a long time. Sensation has been distorted for a long time. The body has adapted intelligently to the conditions it was given, which happened to be a chair, a screen, and very little variation. Adaptation is not failure.
Tension and stiffness may reach a very sore point, but it is reversible. However it does take time and consistency. If it took months and years to build up to today’s tension, then it will take time and patience to unwind it. We just have to start somewhere!
Movement moves us
Gentle mobility restores flow to the areas that have been stuck. It changes the pattern of load so that different fibres take a turn and the ones that have been holding all morning get to put something down. And it gives your nervous system new information, which matters more than most people realise: a region that moves through its full range regularly is a region that gets updated. It stays in the map. Sensation stays proportionate. The alarm has less reason to keep sounding.
Tissue that moves stays supple and gets to keep its options. Tissue that does not move loses them slowly, and that loss is what people are actually feeling when they say they feel stiff.
Once an hour beats three times a week
In my practice I say this often, and I mean it more strongly than I probably sound: getting up to move for just one minute, once an hour of your working day does more for tension than going to the gym x times per week.
I am not arguing against training. I am arguing that these two things solve different problems. Training three times a week is excellent for building strength and capacity, but it does very little about the seven and a half hours you spent immobile on Tuesday. The tension you carry is built by duration, not by intensity, and duration is what has to be interrupted.
Standing up, letting the arms swing, turning the head slowly to each side, reaching overhead, walking to the window and letting your eyes look at something further away. Add more kinds of movement when you take the toilet breaks.
Rest and movement is infrastructure. A healthy infrastructure is a foundation for any ideal life.
Where hands come in
Some patterns have been in place too long to move or be felt on their own. When an area has been held for years, it often will not respond to your own effort, partly because you cannot feel it well enough to reach it and partly because effort is what put it there.
This is the part of the work I do. Slow, sustained contact gives an area that has been working without pause something to soften against, and it gives your nervous system a break from its usual patterns. Circulation and sensation returns. Very often people find that the shoulder they could not feel is suddenly available to them again, and that the movement they were told to do finally makes sense in their own body.
Sessions happen near Ostkreuz, and most of the people on my table are the same people I have described here: working at screens, carrying more than they meant to, arriving with shoulders that have been up near their ears since roughly 2019.
Something to try this week
Set movement break reminders once an hour tomorrow. Stand up and let your body do whatever it wants for a minute, without deciding in advance what the right movement is.
You may notice how long your shoulders have been where they are. That noticing is not a small thing. It is most of what has been missing.