Whether you’re a career obsessed go-getter or a committed parent who muddles through their job as a means to an end to put food on the table and make sure their kids happy and well provided for, chances are you spend a long time at work. In today’s uneven economy where the cost of living is rising well above inflation many of us are working longer hours and even working multiple jobs to make ends meet. The trouble is, beside the stress and toil of your job itself, most modern workplaces are fundamentally unhealthy places to be. The fact that most 21st century jobs require a lot of sitting still and looking at screens sets them at odds with human physiology, causing us to form habits which are damaging to our health. Fortunately, there are a few small and simple changes you can make that can mitigate the damage to your health and make work a healthier place to be.
Get up and moving as much as possible
Sitting for hours upon hours every day can be ruinous to your health. Most of our working (and leisure) activities tend to involve a lot of sitting, but the truth is that sitting is a relatively new development in human behaviour and our physiology hasn’t quite adapted to it yet. As a result, spending too long sitting in a chair can lead to severe health problems including a host of muscular and skeletal disorders. It can even increase your risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Thus, it’s important to get up and moving, even if it’s just a quick walk to the water cooler, roughly once every half an hour. Likewise, walking or cycling to work where possible can be a much healthier alternative to even more sitting in the car.
Get an occupational health assessment
While you might think you’ve taken steps to keep your workplace a healthy environment, it doesn’t hurt to get an occupational health assessment done. You might wonder “What Is An Occupational Health Assessment?” it seems that even though they’re a common workplace assessment, not all employers invest in them. They’re basically an assessment that’s carried out in any work environment to make sure the job isn’t impacting an employee’s physical or mental health. It’s something every business should invest in.
Look after your eyes
Human eyes are not naturally suited to looking into glowing rectangles for hours on end and a combination of brightly lit screens and poor ambient light can be exhausting, and even damaging for your eyes. Computer glasses are a useful way of reducing the damage of the blue light caused by computer screens. You should also give your eyes a break of about 5-10 minutes every hour with a trip to the bathroom or water cooler (just resist the urge to hop onto your smartphone).
Eat responsibly
Firstly, you should never skip breakfast. To do so slows your metabolism to a crawl and ensures you’ll spend your morning grouchy, irritable and unable to concentrate. A breakfast rich in complex carbohydrates will stabilise your blood sugar and prevent cravings. Likewise healthy snacking on nuts, carrot sticks or dried fruit can prevent low blood sugar that will cause you to crave sugary, fatty and salty processed foods and lead to poor choices at lunch time.
Don’t drink the milk
Well, the increasingly widespread opinion of medical experts is that you shouldn’t drink any milk, but the shared milk in most workplaces is a particular no-no. Not knowing how long the refrigerator has been left open, who’s been chugging straight from the bottle (it happens) and not knowing how long milk has spent outside the fridge make it a potential hive of unfriendly bacteria. Bring your own and make sure it’s labelled to minimise this risk.