Surprise, surprise, people are different to each other. I pretty much can only sleep on my back, no other positions allow me to fall asleep. Also, I don’t snore.
But I’m also very much in shape with no excess weight, snoring is generally correlated with ill health and being overweight.
Worth pointing out the false dichotomy here. I sleep better on my side, but I fall asleep better on my back! So ideally I'd go to bed on my back and then have someone push me over to my side once I'm sleeping...
I'm an expert snorer and can snore in any position. Probably central apnea, which only activates when most comfortable; previous sleep study showed nothing, presumably because I wasn't totally comfortable. I'd self medicate with a cpap if they were sold without a prescription. B1 with dinner/before bed helps, oddly.
Also, my previous cats preferred to sleep on my chest, so they trained me to sleep without a lot of motion. Currenrly, one cat likes to sleep on my legs and overheats them, resulting in a lot of movement at night; the other cat will only briefly visit at night, but will help me stay in place for naps on the couch.
I'm skeptical that there's anything especially unhealthy about sitting at a desk even for long periods of time. What's more plausible to me is that back pain comes from having a weak back and it's more about what you're not doing, which is training your back muscles. Over the course of about a year, weight lifting eliminated a range of aches and pains I'd developed throughout adulthood, including back, wrist and knee pain. For the back it's all about deadlifts. In hindsight it seems obvious, all the muscles supporting my spine are visibly larger and demonstrably more powerful, carrying my body around is a much easier job for them now. Sinking into a padded chair after a few big lifts also feels fantastic and now feels like a perk of my job lol
>I'm skeptical that there's anything especially unhealthy about sitting at a desk even for long periods of time. What's more plausible to me is that back pain comes from having a weak back
I figure few habits will give you a weaker back than sitting at a desk for longer periods of time.
I dunno. I never had chronic back or neck pain until I started working office jobs. When I was at university, I spent periods sitting at desks, but was never strapped to one for 8 hour shifts. I would sit down at a desk for max 4 hours at a time apart from during extreme crunch periods, and would spend the rest of my day walking around, lounging and chilling in different positions, excercising, etc. As soon as I started working at an office it became noticably harder to reach an over-10k step count daily, and even though I continued going to the gym and doing heavy back days, my left trap has become completely hardened up, and I've occasionally had lower back pain too during stressful times. I'm totally unable to train upper traps because they are literally like bricks. When I have a weekend where I walk and lounge a lot, or am off sick, or go on holiday, my traps feel significantly better and my workouts are better. It's a lifestyle where you are unnaturally in one position for too long that causes this.
A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick, but supportive ergonomic chairs are part of the long term problem IMHO.
And deadlifts are not the only solution. I started out using just a backless stool and it helped a bit (can't slouch!), but what really sorted me out was using the "lumbar machine" at the gym for a couple of years. When Covid came along I couldn't go any more so I started doing "the plank" at home, that plus the "side plank" and some push ups have kept me going the last four years. And it's totally free and I can do them basically anywhere e.g. on holiday.
> A lot of people end up thinking it's about ergonomic chairs. An un-ergonomic chair will make things bad pretty quick
I'm still fairly young so I probably shouldn't be so quick to say – maybe I'll have to eat my hat in the next decade or two – but I feel like this is also one of those "it's not the thing but how you use it" type situations. I have always used un-ergonomic fairly spartan wood chairs and stools without problem.
What I do, that I don't see everyone else do, is adjust my position a lot. Since I find the chair slightly uncomfortable, I have like a million different positions I can sit in and I rotate through them naturally throughout the day. I haven't seen any science on it but it would make sense that variety helps prevent damage caused by prolonged exposure to one position.
That might help to some degree, but I bet actually exercising your back muscles regularly will have a larger effect.
I mean I'm sure of it. It seems like common sense we've forgotten. Stress the muscles, eat a generous amount of protein, they will grow and get stronger. Do stuff that doesn't stress them as much, they will stay weak and that will lead to complications.
Similar to how the discussion around obesity has become so complicated, in a country where the #1 cause of death is heart disease. It is not complicated, obesity leads to heart disease, to reduce your risk, you must become less obese. Yet we insist on complicating the topic.
It's social media that has turned our brains into mincemeat. I can't concentrate on anything for more than 5 minutes anymore. I'm definitely worse at coding than I was 10 years ago.
Yeah, I am actually feeling this a little bit. Five years ago I could still focus properly. It is already way harder I find. Though another part is that I am way more aware of things I do not know, so I get caught in decision paralysis because of things I do know will break, and because of things I did not know of.
Mate, don't point it out! Just enjoy how nice it is being able to be a "professional" without having to be a professional and regulated all the time. Imagine in ten years if they brought in a bunch of tests you had to do to get a programmers license - I'd honestly probably just change career, and in the end we'd just end up with a further shortage of programmers.
I use basically nothing of what I learned at uni to do my job. Everyone knows that the best devs usually didn't have any formal education. It's all based on merit - let's just keep it that way as it seems to work fine.
As a counter example - I'm currently living in Germany and I need a guy to fix up the walls of my house. Problem is it's impossible to find anyone to do it because there's not enough qualified craftsmen in the country. Everything is so tightly regulated that nothing gets done anymore, so instead there's a move towards folk trying to do it for themselves and buying materials from non-regulated big American-style hardware stores. Wouldn't life be better if we all had a broader skill set and were able to hack things together ourselves in an unofficial capacity like programmers do?
>Imagine in ten years if they brought in a bunch of tests you had to do to get a programmers license -
You mean like leet code, white bording and take home tests? Except that instead of being standardized/credentialized, every company has a different variation you need to study or do unpaid work, for every interview.
Yeah, good thing we don't have that kind of testing, this is so much better./s
> You mean like leet code, white bording and take home tests? Except that instead of being standardized/credentialized, every company has a different variation you need to study or do unpaid work, for every interview.
We don't test our accounting candidates on advanced accounting theories. We just trust the certification and the experience on their resume.
But we ask our developer candidates with take home tests. I wonder why. /s
This describes me to a certain degree, and it's perfectly doable. I'm sure a lot of people do this, and I think a lot of the "find something you love" kind of posts are idealistic and unrealistic. I used to love software when I was younger and it was fresh and I still thought I might be a genius who could do something amazing, but then I went it to the real world and discovered that I was fairly average in what I did and, much importantly, anything you do for 40 hours a week becomes boring and a drag. That's why I keep my real interests and hobbies to my spare time where they're limited in time so they can't get boring. But at the same time this means I will never get that good at anything.
There are a small percentage of folk who are really good at programming and are at the bleeding edge making really cool stuff but for the vast majority it's just brick laying for a wage, which I think is fine but programming is exhausting so it's hard to find comfort and not burn out. I manage by having found cool guys to work with so it's a good laugh. I do wonder what I'll do when I finally just don't have the mental resilience to write code anymore and have to find another job.
