 Hi everyone. My name is Christina, and as she mentioned, I'm from Canada. I've been working in web or digital media on and off for getting close to 20 years now, and I've worked in agencies, studios, all kinds of different variety of work, working with clients directly, and then for the last 10 years I've been a freelancer, working from home. As much as the clients and the job and the work environment have changed over the years, one thing has always remained the same for me, and that has been the ongoing challenge with my health working in the digital space. Some of the problems that I developed were immediate, and some took quite a lot longer actually to come around, but all have very negatively impacted my work and my ability to earn. So today I wanted to go over with you some of the various things that you can do to help alleviate some of the health challenges that digital workers face. So right away into my career, I was gung ho and really wanted to make a good impression, so I worked lots of long hours, but almost immediately I started to develop an eye twitch, and sometimes that twitch would last for hours. Then my vision began to blur, and I started to get splitting headaches. After many visits to doctors, I learned of a condition called digital eye strain, and this is a repetitive motion injury, very similar to carpal tunnel, but it affects your eyes because you're looking at the same path over and over again. Digital eye strain can cause all kinds of problems, like I mentioned blurred vision, dry eyes, headaches, things like that, and so I had to go through some steps to try to alleviate the problem. Up to 65% of people experience eye strain and discomfort from digital device use, so this is a big problem that affects everyone. If your eye strain becomes strong enough, it can really prevent you from being able to work because you can't continue to look at the screen. Even people with perfect vision may experience symptoms such as blurred vision, eye strain, and headaches from improper computer use. It can lead to an assortment of problems that will impact your ability to keep working, so some of the things that I've learned to help alleviate eye strain are follow a 2020-2020 rule, and so what that means is take a 20 second break from the screen every 20 minutes and look at something 20 feet away. What that does is it allows your eyes to have a bit of a rest and focus on something different that's at a different distance. It will really help alleviate your eyes just to take that little bit of a break. It's also important to reduce the overhead glare over your monitor so that it's a little easier on your eyes to look at, and make sure you position your monitor at least an arm's distance away and try to position it at eye level or ever so slightly lower to impact your eyes as little as possible when you have to look at a screen all day. Now as I continued on in my career I ended up becoming a freelancer and I could work from home and I loved this because it let me control my own schedule and work whatever hours I wanted to and I found that I absolutely loved working at night. It was dark and quiet and there was no interruptions but eventually that led to its own array of health problems. I developed insomnia as well as eventually an anxiety disorder from working late at night. Artificial blue light from your screen interrupts your circadian rhythm and it suppresses the hormone melatonin by up to 22% which greatly impacts your sleep. Harvard research has even linked working the night shift and exposure to blue light to several types of cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and an increased risk of depression. It's something that we all don't pay enough attention to is the fact that we're looking at a blue light emitting screen for most of our workday and that can have a huge impact on your health and your body. Some tips for dealing with the blue light is that you could get yourself some really cool blue blocker sunglasses but if these aren't your style then you can actually get screen apps which do the same thing and the whole point of these apps and these glasses are to limit the amount of blue light you're taking in each day. It's especially important at night. Now they do recommend not to look at screens for at least two or three hours before bed but I'm pretty sure everyone here is guilty of checking their Facebook right before they go to sleep so at the very least install an app. A lot of Apple products already have an app installed that dims the screen to kind of more of an orange hue at night. You can get other apps as well such as Flux but definitely try for the last few hours before you go to bed to make sure you're not exposed to blue light. It also helps to turn down the lights before bed about an hour or two before you go to sleep start dimming the lights in your home and turning off overhead lights to try to get your body to adjust to a sleep cycle and make sure that you expose yourself to lots of bright light during the day. This will help your body stay in a normal rhythm and be able to sleep when you need to. I did mention anxiety and we do have some other awesome speakers this weekend that are going to talk about mental health so I'm not going to touch on it very long but I will give you just a few tips on some of the things that helped me alleviate some of my anxiety and the number one thing is take a break from your computer get out of your house and go for just even a short walk just to break apart your work day so that you're not constantly bombarded with dings and notifications. Even meditating for five minutes can have a huge impact on calming your anxiety and your nerves and make an effort to connect in person. You know we all work in digital and we get so used to everything happening by email and Slack notifications but try to make an effort to leave the house and go out to have meetings or get together with colleagues in person and especially if you're a freelancer you need to set hard boundaries between work and your personal life. It's unrealistic to work all the time without any break from all of the different things that are happening in your workspace. So as I mentioned I've worked in digital for quite a long time and after you know 15 to 20 years of working even though I'd solved those other health problems more were still to come. I started to develop incredibly bad back pain as well as wrist pain. The longer you sit at a computer the worse it gets and eventually over time my back would hurt so much I couldn't stay sitting any longer. I would find myself pacing around my office trying to do anything I could to get relief from it. My wrist would hurt so much that sometimes my fingers and my entire hand would go so numb I couldn't keep clicking the mouse anymore. Now these are problems that all of us are at risk of because they are caused by too much sitting and I know that sounds like a joke but sitting is probably the biggest health risk every person in this room faces because the amount of time that we spend sitting each day has a bigger impact on our health than the amount of exercise we get and it's a growing problem because on average we spend more time sitting than we spend sleeping each day. Some reach searchers have even suggested that sitting for more than six hours a day makes you 40% likelier to die within 15 years than someone who sits for less than three hours a day even if you exercise and one of the professors of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. has even stated that sitting is more dangerous than smoking kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are literally sitting ourselves to death. And this is really important for everyone in the room because we sit in front of a computer all day and if you want to have a long career in digital or in computers then you really need to try to break up this habit. The longer you sit the more your blood stops flowing the more your organs stop processing and the greater risk you are at all types of diseases. I read one stat that said that there is a 92% increased risk of type 2 diabetes if you sit at a desk job. So just a couple of tips for how we can break up the patterns of sitting all day and that is to stand up every 30 minutes, move your body around, stretch a little bit and ideally spend about 15 minutes per hour standing. Make sure you drink a lot of water that keeps the body going and at the very least it gives you another reason to have to get up and take a break and make sure you exercise regularly. Investing in a quality office setup is also going to make a huge difference to you. Get a standing desk, get an ergonomic chair, make sure you're making your work environment as comfortable as possible so that it has the least impact on your physical health and of course you'll need to learn how to sit properly. I don't have a lot of tips to go over because I'm a bit short on time here but make sure your feet are flat on the floor, your monitor is arm length distance away and make sure that there isn't any sharp corners like the edge of your desk digging into your forearm and that will begin to make a difference for you because those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness and with that I'll leave you just a couple other resources and I think we might have time to squeeze in a question or two. I just wanted to quickly add about the health because I'm many years in this so to stand for two hours you have not just have a standing desk with a balance board there's like for 250 like like a roller board this helps you to stand for two hours then the sitting you can have 135 percent degrees not 90 if you have a horse sitting type chair there's a sully swing fit in sweden that's like really helping chair so you start your day with standing for two hours then you stay on the salad chair for four hours and then the last three hours you're sitting on the regular chair so then actually you have this is heavy load only for three hours that's how I saw it for myself that does really work and then regarding blue color if you have a led monitor not lcd you having a light coming through the white and you don't have that sunlight effect so I advise to get 60 hertz lg led monitor that does really help great thank you a couple of comments and some other things that you can get for your office to help change up your positioning is there any other questions anybody else with a question go ahead hi I was wondering if you know if the blue light apps are as effective as glasses because I've been using blue light apps for a while now and I was just wondering I'm not sure what is more effective the apps or the glasses I find the glasses a little bit uncomfortable to wear just because they're you know they're eight dollars on amazon they're not exactly like real glass lenses or if they're real they're like a hundred euro okay well yes you can buy cheap ones or you can get good quality ones I only got the cheap ones but the biggest thing is just reducing the light and trying not to use a screen right before bed yeah thank you all right I think that's all all the time that we have thank you so much Christina thank you thank you