I’ve been having extremely bad pain in the joint that joins my thumb with the rest of my hand. I didn’t realize what it was until a couple of days ago. Turns out that I can blame it on computers. I’ve been working a lot on my laptop lately. Actually I work on my laptop 100% of the time, but most of the times I plug in an external keyboard and screen. However, in the past month or so I’ve been using the device’s keyboard itself. The other day it hit me why I was having this excruciating pain. It’s because of the way I use my thumb to get to the right shift and cursor keys. Turns out, as shown in the wonderful diagram below, I bend my thumb under my hand to get to the keys instead of using my right pinky for the shift and moving my whole hand down to get to the other keys. Using my thumb has made me extremely fast with the keyboard.
My pain problem is that right now, as stupid it as it may seem, it’s extremely hard to get rid of the habit. So I really feel like Homer every time I repeat the same movement and cringe in pain. Doh!
So, if you’re like me, don’t do this movement. Stop it before it starts to hurt, literally!