Today’s episode is entitled “Your chair and your back pain / sciatica” and the main points covered are:

• Don’t blame your chair for your back pain / sciatica
• Adapt the chair
• Change the chair
• Stop the negative thinking about your back pain / sciatica
• Stop procrastinating and whining

Don’t blame your chair for your back pain / sciatica

It’s just a chair, it’s totally inanimate. There is nothing living about it, it’s manmade. The chair means you new harm, so it’s completely nonsensical to blame it. How is that going to empower you?

Adapt the chair

Conventional office chairs have features that can go up and down, in and out. You can make adaptations on the chair. If you don’t have that kind of chair, and you’re just sitting on a kitchen chair or a dining chair, or even on a stool, you can still adapt it. Put a towel onto your bottom to raise it higher up, cushion the edge of the chair with it. Roll up another one to sausage shape and tape it up into a range sheep. Shove it in the small of your back as a makeshift lumber rule.

Change the chair

If you just can’t adapt the chair to suit you and support you well, just change it. If you’re in a job that’s going to require you to do a lot of desk work and you’re gonna want to sit for part of the next one, two, three decades, just change it. Don’t extubate and make the chair work for you. Some people spend more time sitting down than they do lying down. You have more time in a chair than in a bed, so it’s vitally important that it works for you. So if you can’t adapt it, change it.

Stop the negative thinking about your back pain / sciatica

If you go on and google “equation for pain” you will come up with a recent blog post of mine explaining that when you think negatively, it increases your back pain /sciatica. If you want to know how that works, go listen to episodes five and six, they cover it. Start to pay attention to your thoughts and try to turn them into more positive ones.

Stop procrastinating and whining

If you’re putting off steps 2 and 3, adapting and changing your chair, you’re just procrastinating, which won’t help you. There’s no point in blaming your chair. The chair means you no harm. So adapt it, change it and stop the negative thinking. Stop procrastinating. If you are whining about your chair, you’re crying alone. Whining about it doesn’t do you, or the people around you, any good, and it won’t help your back pain / sciatica, either.