Guest Author - Anne Asher

Pain can serve as communication to you about what is happening in your body. Author and bodyworker Deane Juhan says in his book, "Job's Body", that pain's "primary function is to alert the central nervous system to damage or destruction of the body's tissues."

As most of us learn in basic Biology class, living organisms tend toward homeostasis. This means we seek balance, a zone of experience that is neither over nor under stimulated.

The human musculoskeletal system is no exception. It is often likened to machine, especially when it is studied in formal settings, such as universities. Bones are called levers, muscles are motors, and we apply terms such as mass, velocity and force to describe what our bodies can do. We might say that the musculoskeletal system seeks homeostasis in a mechanical way.

This is where ergonomics comes in. If a body at work is positioned in an awkward or straining position, it will feel awkward or strained; this will usually be interpreted as pain (or at least discomfort) by the person. Actually, the pain is a message that the body is out of bounds from its sense of homeostasis, or its balanced position.

How does this message called pain get delivered to you? Pain is manufactured by a very complicated process in the nervous system. The human capacity for sensation is designed much like a computer system. In extremely general terms, there are sensors (called receptors) in our bodies that take in information about what is affecting from both the inside (body position) and the outside. The information at this point is not in a form we can understand. The sensors send that information to the brain for interpretation. The brain processes the signals and then returns the information to us in an understandable form. Depending upon which type of sensor took in the original stimulus and sent it to the brain, the resultant experience may be pain, cold, hot, ticklishness, or a host of other sensations.

There is initial pain and there is continuing pain. Initial pain signals reach the brain quickly to quickly provide warning that something outside of homeostasis has just happened. The sensors for continuing pain detect the extent of the damage and communicate that back to to the person (via the brain). The continuing type of pain has an accumulating feature, so that over time, more and more signals are sent to the brain for interpretation.
Earlier I mentioned that some of the sensors (receptors) communicate information about body position. These sensors are located in joints, muscles, and tendons. These receptors will certainly play a role in the pain or lack of it while you sit at a computer. Since sitting at a computer, for most people, lasts several hours at a stretch, it is wise to pay attention to those messages that arrive in your consciousness!

In future articles, I will write about ways you can develop awareness and understanding of these feelings. I will also write about ways to interrupt that accumulating mass of continuing pain signals, so you can return to homeostasis, and work!