I have this bad habit of putting my right hand in a position where I’m in a constant “stress” position while holding the mouse. This is because I want to always be able to quickly scroll with the middle mouse button up and down on webpages. So I tend to arch the front of my hand in a way where my hand is hovering slightly above the front of the mouse. This enables me to constantly be able to scroll, without needing to pause even for a second. It is a terrible habit and now I’m feeling the beginning of pain that I’ve been able to successfully attribute to this bad habit. If I kept this behavior up, I would have easily developed some sort of repetitive motion or early arthritis problem.
So what I did earlier today, was that I changed a setting on my mouse that made it so the right and left mouse buttons were switched. This made it so left clicking became a right click and vise-versa. But it didn’t stop there. I then switched the mousepad from being on the right hand side of my keyboard to the left hand side of my keyboard. The next step was to move the mouse itself to the left hand side.
As you can see, I’m now using my mouse with my left hand. It is quite awkward, but not bad enough to impair my speed of navigating my computer. And it is definitely making me slow down when using the computer in the department of how I hold the mouse. The reality is that I basically said to myself, “If I can’t break this bad habit with my right hand, then my right hand is going to loose computer mouse privileges for a few weeks and we’ll see how things go.”
Just a few hours with using the mouse in a different hand plus going to writer’s group has been a serious relief to my right hand. By no means am I ambidextrous yet, but I’m curious to see if there will be any hemispheric brain activity increases or perspective changes as a result of this simple variation in a daily behavior.
I remember trying to pass the bass in Waterpolo was extremely difficult at first, but after practicing for years, well…it was still hard, but it improved my control when I used my right hand.
Sometimes comfort zones can create efficiency but can also put the mind and muscles into routines that have detrimental effects on the entire body as a system.
It is interesting, after I typed that last sentence, I took a break and thought about what I was going to write next. But when I did that, I kept my left hand on the keyboard, (I write with both hands, using pretty much every finger) and I let my right hand rest on my right leg. The reason why I bring this up, is because when I would use the mouse in my right hand, in a similar situation my left hand would have been the one taking a break on my left leg. So it is worthwhile to mention that there has already been collateral behavioral change as a result of this relatively new habitual change.
-Tyler