4 Ways to Improve Your Posture with Good Personal Habits

December 10, 2020

4 Ways to Improve Your Posture with Good Personal Habits

By: Lily Friedman

A woman practices good personal habits at her desk to maintain good posture.

 

Having good posture at home can be difficult.

Between hovering over a computer every day for work, sitting on the couch and losing lunch-break walks that get you up and moving, posture can fall through the cracks.

Some only have a laptop to work on from home. Others only have ill-placed monitors, or an uncomfortable desk chair. And even if you have a computer at the perfect height to maintain your posture, sitting in the same position for hours on end can be tiring in itself.

Good posture is an essential part of your health. According to a University of Michigan study, bad posture -- especially from computer use -- can lead to neck and back pain later in life. But with stay-at-home orders and quarantines necessitating that many work from home, many need creative solutions to keep their posture up on a day-to-day basis.

Your daily habits create your long-term health, so here are four good personal habits to help you better your posture gradually and work toward a more healthy future.

 

1. Get reminders to sit up straight during the workday

As simple as it sounds, correcting your posture can be as easy as sitting up straighter while you work at a computer. Studies show that technology use is one of the biggest contributors to bad posture, and reminding yourself multiple times per day to sit up straighter and correct your posture even while you use a computer is a great way to train your body to have better posture.

By reminding yourself a few times a day to sit up straight, your body will begin getting used to the position, and gradually, your posture will correct.

A great tool to remind you to do this is minder by obVus solutions. minder is an application that will send reminders throughout the day to sit up straight and fix your posture through small actions. While an obvious fix, sitting up straighter is the most direct way to fix slouching over a computer screen; after all, it combats it directly. Getting reminders from minder to fix this part of your posture, while easy, is essential to fixing the bad posture that slouching over a computer has caused for many.

 

A woman does cat-cow, a yoga position good for posture.

2. Practice short exercises for your posture

Aside from fixing posture habits while you're working, a good way to break up the slouching is to incorporate stretching that elongates your back into your day-to-day routine. Developing good personal habits like a daily yoga workouts will help your posture in the long-term.

One great stretch for this is the cat-cow. To do the position, first get on your hands and knees. Arch your back up like a cat, and let yourself sit in that upside-down U shape until you are ready to switch. Then, switch the concavity of your arch and tilt your back into a U shape. By switching slowly between these positions, your back muscles will activate and elongate, stretching out whatever stiffness they acquired from sitting in a desk chair all day.

Another exercise to practice daily is a cobra pose. To do this, lay on your stomach and slowly lift your back up from your abdomen. Keep lifting slowly, pushing on your arms, with your head lifting last. This position puts length in your back, strengthening and stretching your back out.

By making these stretches a habit, you will feel the release in your spine and help improve your posture daily.

 

3. Lift your laptop

If you find it difficult to keep your posture straight while you work even with reminders, a solution that could help you to cement the habit on the daily is to elevate your laptop.

By moving your laptop to a height that keeps your posture straight, you'll need to sit up straight to see the screen, helping to maintain good personal habits with posture throughout the day. Even if you only raise your laptop for bits and pieces of the day, any lengthening of the spine can help with your daily posture.

The Adjustable Laptop Tower Stand from obVus is a great way to move your laptop throughout the day to maintain your posture. This will work with minder to create great habits surrounding posture throughout the work day.

 

A man slouches as he works from home on a laptop.

4. Be conscious of your posture

While it is easy to forget about your physical well-being during busy, challenging or stressful workweeks, a last helpful tip to help improve posture with good personal habits is to simply weave thinking about your posture into your daily life.

Even without reminders, being conscious of your posture will make you feel better throughout the day. Thinking about and maintaining physical well-being is proven to relieve stress according to the United Kingdom National Health Service, and giving yourself mental breaks to be conscious of physical surroundings is a great way to help posture and relieve the stress of work at the same time.

Being conscious of your physical body, while simple, will help you to focus on your posture throughout the work day.

 


Though working at home can force you to be on a computer all day, that does not have to come at the expense of your posture. With these four daily habits, you can gradually change your posture and help with the strain of sitting at a computer.

Reminding yourself to sit up, working posture exercises into your daily routine, using obVus Solutions' Adjustable Laptop Tower Stand and being conscious of your body: four easy and quick solutions that can help your posture in the long term and get you sitting up straighter with better habits during work.

 

 

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