Working From Home, Pain-Free at Last!

A homemade dynamic workstation made all the difference

You can build your own bench with scraps of wood. Experiment to get the slope right. Sketch by Author.

I’ve worked from home as a self-employed designer, writer and editor for over 30 years. During that time I gave birth to and raised 4 children with my wonderful husband and business partner by my side and experienced the ups and downs that can go with working from home:

• flexible hours
• lack of motivation
• success
• failure
• the ability to control my work environment
• declining physical health when I felt too busy to sleep, eat or exercise.

The wake-up call

One day when I was in my early 40s, I discovered that I waddled like someone twice my age and size, and couldn’t get up off the floor without holding on to something.

What a blow for this once slim, fit and healthy woman! I mean, I once taught myself to do the splits just because I could.

How had I come to this??

Eyes opened by a bitter reality pill, I saw things were even worse than at first glance. My daily choices over the past couple of decades had caused me to:

• put on 20 kg (44 lb)
• suffer from…