Tips To Maintain Your Health While Blogging

This blog post was first published on November 21, 2011. Today on April 23, 2016, I am reposting this blog post with some updated content. You might have noticed that recently I have started repurposing my old articles because things have been changed quite a lot in recent years. And, when I read my old posts now, I feel there are many more things that can be added to them. Therefore, I am on my way of repurposing old content to offer updated information to my readers.

Much chatter already! Let’s get on to the topic now which is “Tips to maintain your Health While Blogging”.

Generally, I don’t give health tips as I am not an expert in this area. However, being a responsible member of the blogosphere, I felt I should write something different and more useful for everyone out there. And, I thought of this topic. And,
what’s better when someone is alarming you for maintaining your health? After all, Health is Wealth.

I am sure you are going to love this post because it relates to you and almost every blogger.

Being a blogger, you must know how much a blogger needs to work in front of a computer system for longer hours. There is not only one work of writing and publishing rather a blogger spends his time producing new content, building links, researching for new content ideas, finding new money making ideas, and so on. There are many small and big jobs are there that a blogger manages to do every day.

Everyday bloggers have to face new challenges because of increasing competitions, changing search algorithms, and many other things.

To compete with all these challenges of day-to-day blogging, bloggers have to work very hard that most of the times result in sleepless nights and consistent sitting hours without any breaks.

There is so much to do; still bloggers love the way of their working. But, these sleepless nights and sitting in front of computer for longer hours may lead to many health problems sooner or later. A few very common health problems among bloggers I found are listed below:

1. Back Pain
2. Eye Problems
3. Neck Pain
4. Headache
5. Weight Gain
6. Deficiency of Vitamin D

Let’s get into more details of these problems and discuss few tips to keep them away from you:

1. Back Pain

Back Pain is very common among the bloggers and people who sit in front of a computer for long hours. There are solutions to everything. You can do a few below-mentioned things to avoid:

• Maintain a straight posture while sitting in front of the computer.
• Gift yourself a chair that maintains an ergonomic seating position to level out your knees and hips as when you sit this way; you are less prone to back pain. Look at the image below that may give you a fair idea of how to sit and work in front of the computer in the right posture.
  Image Source Link
• Take regular breaks and walk between working hours. It doesn’t only help you avoid back pain; it also helps you maintain a good blood flow throughout your body. You should also incorporate stretching into your routine. Protalus mentions that because we all carry stress in our hips, the butterfly stretch is a good way to decrease tension and increase flexibility in this area of our body. Whether we walk, run, or sit, our hips are a magnet for stress and are an important part of the kinetic chain.

2. Eye Problems

Whenever you watch TV or look at the computer monitor or your laptop screen for longer hours, you may feel itching in eyes or water coming out of them. Sometimes these problems are temporary, but if you keep avoiding them, they may become big problems.

Most of the bloggers do sit in front of their laptops to do a lot of work related to blogging. Therefore such eye strain and rolling tears may happen.

You should do below-mentioned things to avoid eye problems:

• Give regular breaks to your eyes by closing your eyes for a few minutes in between your working hours. I would recommend taking 10 minutes break after every hour. Taking a break from work doesn’t mean you get onto your mobile phone or TV. You must close your eyes to give them some rest. Follow this, and I bet you won’t feel your eyes tired or strained.
• Even after taking breaks, if you feel strain you should rinse your eyes with cold water.
• Put 1-2 drops of Rose Water (Gulab Jal in Hindi) in your eyes because it is good for eyes. I use it as an eye drop medicine on an everyday basis because it helps my eyes stay fit.
• If you are using old CRT computer monitor, it’s high time you should replace that with LCD monitor because that is good for eyes and they have anti-reflective (Source).

3. Neck Pain

Neck Pain is very common in bloggers and the computer users who consistently work for longer hours. What happens is when you are busy working on some projects, your neck doesn’t move for a longer duration, and it keeps on heading towards the monitor. It leads to severe pain in the neck, and then when you move it left, and right you feel intense pain sometimes.

You can follow a few things that may help you avoid such Neck Pain:

• I said earlier in this post too, take regular breaks, and either walk or take rest a bit between your working hours. When you take breaks, your neck does not stay in one direction, and it moves here and there as you do other activities or take rest or walk. It gives good relief to the neck.
• Relax your neck by stretching and massaging. There are various neck exercise and Yoga that you do to get relieved from pain. Always, consult experts or doctors before you start doing any exercise or Yoga because if you do them wrong, they may adversely affect you.
• Maintain a good angle of looking at your computer monitor as it helps you avoid neck pain in most cases. Look at the image below:
  Source: gvsu.edu

Just changing a little bit of your habits of sitting, and keeping the sitting angles into consideration, you can avoid such kind of pains easily.

4. Headache

This is the most frequent problem in the people of our generation, however for computer users, Headache is more frequent. I am also a victim of it as I work for longer hours looking at my laptop screen. However, I found a few ways that help me avoid such headaches. Check them out below:

• I have discussed about eye problems already in this article, and let me tell you that when you have some problems with eyes, most likely you get a headache as well. Therefore, always try to keep your eyes healthy and relaxed. For more you should read the ways of keeping it well as I shared earlier in the post.
• Sometimes when you are working for a longer duration, the mind goes blank, or you don’t feel like working. But due to the pressure of meeting deadlines, you don’t stop working and keep putting pressure on your mind which may cause an intense Thus, when you feel tired or having a low headache, stop working and relax for some time. Better if you can go out with your friends or family for a walk in the open air.
• You may take tea or coffee while working but that too in limits. Don’t intake too much of these as that may affect adversely. Take them in limits and they will help to keep headaches
• Adjust the brightness and contrast of your screen because too much or too less of them may put a strain on eyes that result in a severe

5. Weight Gain

One of the biggest problems of today’s world is obesity, and for computer users, it is becoming even worse because they keep on eating fatty, sugary and salty stuff when they feel hunger while working. Due to which they intake huge amount of calories, but they hardly go for a walk or do exercise. Thus, those calories result in weight gain, and if it is not monitored properly, the situation goes out of control.

Putting up a lot of weight may cause several other health problems. Therefore, you must be careful.

A few things are there which you can do to avoid being fat:

• The one tip is common for all problems that do take breaks and go for a walk.
• Avoid eating high calories as while working, when you intake calories, they don’t get burned due to lack of physical activities. That creates the problem so if you know you cannot spend much time on walking and exercising, limit the intake of calories.
• I would recommend going for 30 minutes’ walk in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening for burning calories. If you cannot go for a walk outside for some reasons, you may buy a Treadmill to do the running at your home.

6. Deficiency of Vitamin D

It is not so common but I wanted to include it because bloggers do work by sitting in their study room, bedroom or office.  They don’t go outside frequently, and due to which their body doesn’t get exposed to Sun that leads to the deficiency of Vitamin D because Sun is the richest source of it. Therefore, do go out and get some Sun bath frequently. It is important because deficiency of Vitamin D leads to many diseases, and the dangerous Type 1 diabetes is one of them. Be careful!

Wrapping Up

As you read what types of health issues bloggers may get when they work day and night, you must be very careful and consider the suggestions which I have shared for each problem.

Apart from all these, a few things you should always do are:

• Drink plenty of water every day.
• Take proper sleep of 7-8 hours.
• If possible play games like football, cricket or any other outdoor games.

Though I am not a doctor or an expert; I have shared these suggestions as per my experience as I am one of those bloggers who work for longer hours every day. After all, health is the real wealth and we all should take care of our real wealth.

What types of health issues you are facing, and what are you doing to avoid them. Do share your views and feedback in comments.