The Standing Desk [α] - Day 7

May 5, 2012

There is a certain volume of accumulated human knowledge — a kind of Encyclopaedia of Safety — that is based on the trial-and-error successes of generations. One entry in that tome might be as quaint as “don’t shit in your bed” (Any argument…?) Our Australian friends have several: “Don’t introduce species into an ecology with no known predators.” (oops), or “Don’t irrigate your desert with a limited aquifer.” (oops)

There are others:

“Don’t build your thermonuclear reactor on a seismic fault, and within reach of tidal waves.”
“Don’t let industry specialists police their own industry.”
“Don’t trust those who profit from a sale to broker it.” (Um…)
“Don’t graft poisons into your food to make it easier to harvest.” (Shit <–> Bed)
“Don’t let the wealthiest dictate what is best for everyone.” (It will not be best for everyone)
“Don’t bring microbes back from Mars to ‘study what happens’.” (Remember the Iroquois Nation?)

We haven’t done that last one. Yet. But you know, the story of over-reaching humans goes back millennia, back to the Greeks’ hubris, back to Mephistopheles and the Faustian sale of soul for short-sighted gain. Those protagonists always suffer; it gives you a queasy feeling to watch their play act itself out in our lives. Keeping pace with them, we have our own long list of endeavors which were best not endeavored. As Aussie Permaculture guru Bill Mollison would say, with a sigh (in reference to some ill-designed experiment, whose results were little less than catastrophic): “Another bad idea…”.

Drawing clean water from a well is a better idea than paying to purify it after its been poisoned. Building smaller and being careful with energy use is a better idea (even in the shortest-sighted measure of “how much this gonna cost me?”) than burying fertile land with lawn and instigating wars to make sure our McMansion is heated to 72F in January deep freeze, cooled to 64F during the August doldrums.

Unless you’ve been picking up what the brokers have been putting down, unless you’ve been lulled into thinking that what we modern folk have invented is New and Improved, some of this crap we’re shoveling in our own beds has got to have you holding your nose, scratching your head, hopping mad, with eyes rollin’ round in your head. All at the same time. I’d like to see someone dramatize that.

Meanwhile, the biology of this planet hasn’t changed much in the past fifty years, so far as I know, so I’m not sure what we’re all fired up about, all spinning our wheels about, other than making a profit.

Ah, humanity. Where is your eagle vision? How far can you imagine into the future?

How does that relate to a Standing Desk, you ask? Well, everything is in everything else (if you look closely), and my decision to create an “alpha” model standing desk out of anything I had laying around is precisely what I would have liked the Nuclear industry to have done before storing spent nuclear fuel in the containment ceilings, and seed companies to have done before selling seed laced with toxins.

How do I know what the consequences will be? I’ve never done this before. In fact, the longer I live, the more certain I am that a) projects always take longer and cost more than the estimate, and b) the complex interdependencies between the living and inanimate elements of our world are such that every action will have many surprising side-effects. Some of which will not be very pleasant. Some which will not be pleasant at all.

So, I am trying to practice what I am trying to preach: in every small way, let’s be slow to jump to conclusions. Let’s be slow to spend our money — money being a convenient placeholder for our time, or our energy, or our spirit. The more money involved and the more power involved, the slower we should go. What, do you think we have to figure something out by tomorrow? By the day after tomorrow?

Egotist! The world and the world’s children will be here for tens of thousands of years after your tiny span of life has ended. Why are you in such a hurry? Do you think you are wiser than the Old Church, who thought the heavens revolved around us? If you don’t believe life goes on beyond You, then you are the same.

Where are you going? When you get there, who will you know?

STANDING DESK ARCHITECTURE

And that’s why I constructed my “alpha”-model standing desk for exactly zero dollars and no cents, on a kitchen counter about the right height, using a storage box full of papers as a monitor stand, and a pile of excellent cookbooks (with a variable number of recipes) to adjust my peripherals. Please note the following features of the Standing Schultz Model-A:

The counter is at waist height, with my main screen a little under eye-level (I might adjust it). My second “status” screen is to the lower left, near the keyboard: it keeps me moving my head up and down instead of at a fixed height.
The full sound system, with woofer at my elbow, is often filled with Brazilian samba or other upbeat music to keep my feet moving, and my heart lifted.
By playing before building, I’ve been able to adjust heights with my cookbook collection. I found that the countertop-level for mouse and keyboard kept my wrists bent, which resulted in hand fatigue.
The table (not pictured) is just about the height of the stool I would buy, to allow sitting times. I can see how much I need a stool (so far, not much), and experiment with padding if I wish.
The scratching post on the floor now gets better use by me than by my cat. It is a foot stool while seated, and (more frequently) a step to gently flex my feet and calves during the day.
A cloth ball (not pictured) that I bought some years ago for plantar fasciitis rolls around at my feet, and makes a great foot refresher. It is harder than a tennis ball, softer than a softball, and between the size of the two.
A couple of 15-lb free weights sit off-camera. I have a meditation timer on my computer that freezes my screen for a couple of minutes each hour. When it “dings”, I stretch and lift. Feels great!

Once I have gone a couple of weeks at this workspace, I’ll decide if I want to “formalize” the arrangement with a Standing Desk Beta Model. I have a great desk that I have been using for a couple of years. It is wooden, elegant, donated from family, free. I bought lumber and screws to build “risers” that can will simply lift the whole thing up a foot or so… once I know the exact heights through my trial-and-succeed process, I’ll know how high to build it.

Going back to my preachy preamble: spend as little energy and money as possible. In a finite world (Who the hell taught us it wasn’t? And what did they gain by teaching us that?), this is a pretty good rule of thumb for insuring continuity. The lumber for my risers cost $19.78. Compared to the standing desks at IKEA ($300-$600), the fine wordworked draftsman’s tables ($2000-$4000), or the high-tech fad treadmill standing desks ($$$$+; the metaphor there is almost unbearable anyway), twenty-dollars seems like a good conservative investment for something I might grow out of.

Oh, and the tortilla press on the wall left of the laptop is of course optional… but so very convenient!

WEEK ONE RESULTS

“So how’s it going?”

Quite well! Having read a number of articles by sedentary folks who had started to use a standing desk for more critical health reasons, I had been worried about the physical burden of the switch. Oh my goodness, eight to ten hours on my feet? That is going to be hell for a while!

Then I remembered that my all-time favorite job was as one of five chef-managers of a cooperative restaurant in Minneapolis: on my feet alllll day, every day, for years. Also, I am pretty darned active for someone who works with computers as a vocation. Here are a few tricks I suddenly remembered, after sheepishly noticing that my mindset had become almost as fixed as that damned chair I was strapped into hour after hour after hour:

Good shoes Now that my body existed again, the first place to give attention was my feet, and the new running I had barely used were vacuumed out and put to service. Great addition, zero cost. I keep them untied, and when I want a change, slip out of them to stand barefoot for a bit, or roll that massage ball under the arch. Ahhhh, that pleasure of self-care is almost worth standing on my feet all day to begin with!
Good posture One of my chef colleagues taught me a good trick. When you are standing at a counter or a sink, peeling things or kneading things or washing things, your posture can get a bit… tilted. That tilt puts unnecessary strain on the lower back, locked your knees and demands more energy than the task requires. “Fourth Position!” was her answer. For those of us who never took ballet, all it means in the context of a standing desk is keeping one foot back and at a 45-degree angle, and the other foot’s heel at the toe, in the opposite 45-degree angle. It straightens your back right up, lifts your head, makes you graceful. Go ahead, guys, lose the pride (and no one is watching anyway) (and you needn’t wear a tu-tu) (but you can if you want, it’s your home office, eh?)
Good breaks You know, it’s all about trading static for fluid. Use technology’s strength to undermine its weakness: I was already using a computer alarm (StillnessBuddy is a tool that uses mindfulness or Christian or other affirmations to break up your day - recommended!) to remind me to take a deep breath, to stretch, to look away so my eyes aren’t fixed close in. I also had it set for a 15-minute “movement” break in the morning and in the afternoon, so my blood didn’t stop flowing and pool in my butt and leave my brain dizzy and gasping… or so I imagined was happening. I continue this practice, and it is even sweeter standing.
Good tools Besides the fasciitis ball, I bought this “Pilates” foam roller a while ago, found it at the Ocean State Job Lot for a few bucks. It’s blue and yellow, 36" long, and about 6" in circumference. I had been thinking about ordering one (they all seemed kind of expensive) when sitting in the chair appeared to be fusing my vertebrae into an internal monument to Stagnation. [Yes, this way folks, don’t crowd: (ahem, ahem): THIS statue, once known as Mark Schultz, loved to run and play as a child, was a star receiver in flag football, would bicycle everywhere, did cartwheels on the lawn, and rested when the clouds were particularly easy to imagine as animals or medieval figures. He calcified sometime after his 35th year (exact date unknown) and was granted to this museum by his next of kin, who visit regularly on their highly-sustainable and free “relatives” pass…] If yo ustop being older than your age, and get down on the floor, your own gravity works wonders as you roll your spine over this semi-soft surface, adjusting your back and shoulders, taking two minutes to break up the stone that settling into your posture and (not incidentally) settling into your ways of thought at the same time.

With all of those little tricks in play, my feet are undeniably a little sorer; but there are gains which so far seem to outweigh that modest ache. I find that, standing freely, I am not only able to move more easily than when framed into a chair, but I constantly do move more. I sway back and forth. I give one foot weight, then the other. I remember my posture and adjust my feet. I lean on the desk/counter. I look up, I look down.

Whereas a week ago I might go a few hours without recognizing my body even existed (just my brain and my hands, tensing up under stress: a “pure intellect”), now my physical self belongs to every minute, and my workday has become a work_dance_! Wow. And while this tangible physical liberty is important, there is an equally-important psychological liberty that seems to underly it, or arise from it. Very interesting: and very satisfying.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE

This is the section of the diatribe my emotional satisfaction with all of this colors everything, so let me preface this “results” section by saying yes, it is just one week I am doing this, not a longitudinal study (like the statistical studies that have correlates earlier death with immobility in office work) and not statistically significant, using a test population of exactly “one”. In other words: Your Results Might Vary.

Still, these are good seed observations that I will water and watch as I move along in this experiment, and my convictions might grow stronger as my data grows more robust. Here’s what I can tell you as of today:

A long-term ache in my left shoulder, that I have been nursing withe Pilates roller and other stretches for weeks, has disappeared. Could be all that work paid off – however, the physical habits we acquire and repeat, minute upon minute, day after day, have a greater negative effect than we (or than I at least) would care to acknowledge. I always use the mouse with my right hand. when in my chair, I frequently lean to that side, and frequently raise my shoulders toward my ears. Not only am I working hard to undo a malady almost certainly caused by habit… but I stopped the habit that was its cause.
Similarly, as a dancer and sometime martial artist, I have found it takes for_ever_ to loosen up the major muscle groups in my legs, specifically the hamstrings. Picture in your mind’s eye your body in a chair: see how the legs are? The quadriceps are lax, untoned, and elongated. The hamstrings are lax, untoned, and foreshortened. The intricate muscles and tendons of the knee are distorted for hours on end. This goes back to the “Build a nuclear reactor on a fault line” idea: what the hell am I doing to myself? Were I constructed to be tied in a chair? Rant aside: these major muscles, which are considered to be the “pump” for the cardiovascular system, already feel in better form and more easily stretched and prepared prior to a workout.
There are quite a number of muscle groups and joints that have been affected by this change. My hip joints and the muscles and tendons that allow flexibility there have also begun to stretch easier, and a few tweaks I have been nursing there have eased. I don’t believe anything happens 100% because of anything else, but the difference seems so abrupt here that the contribution of standing instead of slumping is hard to deny.
Speaking of slumping: my posture is a hundred times better. How does one measure 10,000%, exactly? Purely subjectively, of course. On the other hand, I have been involved in movement practices my whole life, from wilderness hiking and paddling, to sand-lot football and soccer games, to years of martial arts and T’ai Chi, to bodywork training, to yoga, to dance… along the way, you do develop a sensitivity to your own body structure and its workings. So: hyperbolic statement or not, my posture is one hundred times better. During a recent pre-standing-desk epiphany, I likened being desk-ridden to being bed-ridden. I have not changed my mind, rather become more convinced that initial thought was correct.
The first couple of days standing, I noticed a little tiredness in my lower back. That seems to have disappeared. I attribute this to better physical alignment, and strengthened muscles in the back and in the core.
As a man, it is easy to curl up around your every-growing belly as you sit in that desk of yours. All of that contraction is being lengthened as my body is stretched skyward.
I am warmer. (not incidentally, my body is closer to the ceiling where my wood-stove heats the air)
My calves ache a bit - hence the commandeered scratching post.
I am more fatigued at the end of the day. If I make the equation fatigue= bad, I’d sit down again. I am not sure that equation is quite right, though. I think that my body has been working, and that is probably good. I will avoid habitual motions as I can, and that should reduce the negative aspects of that tiredness.
I don’t seem to be as efficient in my work, now that my whole body is present. When it was just brain+computer+intensity, it seemed as though my capacity to focus was greater. But there was enough lack of real physical presence in that scenario that I am about as trusting of my “before” assessment as I am of this “after” assessment. I’ll keep an eye on this. It makes sense that both energy levels and focus would change, and maybe diminish, with this change. It also seems reasonable to assume that, with time to adapt to this new situation, both will rise again. I’ll keep the subjective scientist on duty, gathering data in preparation for a possible Standing-Desk Model-B.

So that’s it. A number of people have been interested in my little experiment, not the least of whom the colleagues who share this intellectually and creatively vital, and physically stagnant profession. If my body is doing all right now, I can thank my parents for good genes, and myself for loving to move. If it weren’t for that, this job where hour after hour only eyes and fingers move would certainly be the end of me.