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Around fifteen years ago, RSI (repetitive strain injury) brought me close to a career change. Just touching my keyboard or mouse felt as if someone was putting a blowtorch to my wrist. Looking for pain relief, I ended up spending years and a small fortune trying out every ergonomic gadget under the sun: from a vertical mouse to a Wacom tablet and oddly shaped keyboards to expensive designer chairs. I even joined an intense two-week treatment program with a ‘RSI recovery specialist’ in New York. None of it made me feel better.
At the height of my desperation, a person in a forum for RSI sufferers mentioned how reading a specific book helped them get better within days. I was very suspicious, not least because the book carried a rather hippy-dippy title.
Now, I’m not one for hyperbole. I try to reserve the big words for when it really matters, so I don’t say this lightly (knowing that I sound like an infomercial): the book changed my life. Most of my pain was gone within a week.
While the title of The Mindbody Prescription sounds like some dubious health influencer’s latest e-book, the author John E. Sarno is a now-famous professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. And boy did he cause a brouhaha when, in the ’90s, he suggested that a lot of chronic pain stems not from physical injuries but our mental state.
The premise of Sarno’s work is that most chronic pain is caused by repressed emotions in the unconscious mind. This doesn’t mean that it’s ‘all in your head’ – a swollen wrist or a bulge in an x-ray is still a physical symptom. But just like our heart starts racing and our hands start sweating when we speak in front of a large audience, our mind is clearly capable of triggering external, physical changes. According to Sarno, those changes and the pain that comes along with them, are a distraction from underlying mental stresses, such as rage, grief or shame.
I’m doing his work a disservice by paraphrasing too liberally. Here's a great video summary of his teachings. This old segment about him by the ABC is a lovely reminder of how sceptical Western medicine was/is towards anything it can’t easily measure on a screen. Since publishing the book in 1998, Sarno has become somewhat of a saint for people with chronic pain. Today, proof of the success of his approach can be found all over the internet. The science is slowly catching up, too.
From people with debilitating back pain to runners with agonising foot issues to thousands of computer geeks with burning keyboard hands – if you’re desperate for pain relief and have tried a few of the conventional treatment options, I can’t recommend Sarno’s book enough. I was extremely suspicious at first, but today I’m proud to count myself as a pain-free Sarno disciple. – Kai
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Become a Friend of DD →
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Dense Discovery is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of technology, design, ethics and sustainability read by over 36,000 subscribers. Do you have a product or service to promote? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Between Grotesque & Geometric SPONSOR
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Tight! Compact! But, also legible.
With Pangea, type designer Christoph Koeberlin successfully manages the balancing act between narrow grotesque typefaces and geometric ones. The second member of the family, Pangea Text, is built upon the same foundations but aims to improve legibility. Download free trial fonts from Fontwerk.
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Apps & Sites
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Creative virtual meeting spaces
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Not dissimilar to Tilde (featured here two weeks ago), Sprout allows you to create virtual spaces to video-chat and be creative together. Add images, lists and other documents or create and customise entire blocks with CSS.
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My password manager of choice now comes with a really useful feature that helps you keep your inbox tidy: through a collaboration with Fastmail, you can now generate disposable email addresses when filling out forms and store them along with your passwords in 1Password. If they start spamming you, you can simply disable the email address from within 1Password.
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Group emails for friends & family
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I first heard of Letterloop in a DD classified some time ago and really liked the concept: it’s a bit like a group email for family and friends where Letterloop collects answers and sends them out in a more organised newsletter-like format. Friends of DD enjoy an additional month for free.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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A fun way to test your ability to detect different languages. Based on over 2,500 samples in nearly 100 languages and 200 dialects from around the world, it’s a lovely, not-for-profit project with the goal of “bringing the world’s languages to a wider audience”.
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Worthy Five: Kelly Ann McKercher
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A video worth watching:
As designers and creatives, we risk worshipping the cult of technology with little thought to how technology shapes, liberates or controls people’s lives. Uninvited Guests by Superflux Studios is a short, speculative film about how technology might paternalise us as we age.
A newsletter worth subscribing to:
Flox Studios by Sloan Leo (they/he) curate a monthly newsletter on community-led design. Each month focuses on a practitioner and an idea, with a community conversation alongside. I most enjoyed a recent newsletter on infrastructure and care.
A book worth reading:
No More Throw-Away People by Edgar S. Cahn frames a simple proposition: What if the people we are trying to ‘fix’ through changes in products, services and policy are the very people who hold the insights and the relationships for change? What if we saw people who are historically under-resourced as creative and capable partners instead of passive recipients? Good things, I think.
A podcast worth listening to:
Amble Studios’ podcast explores how facilitation works and link facilitation to game mechanics. If you’re after sophisticated conversations about collaboration, look no further than Amble.
An Instagram account worth following:
Carly Findlay (she/her) is an appearance activist, writer and editor of Growing up Disabled in Australia. Carly schools us all in unlearning ableism, how to support disability justice and shares disability news that, as non-disabled people, we likely miss or overlook. Also, Carly gives us all the fashion, all the time.
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Books & Accessories
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A unified theory of human endeavour
If you feel like going on a quest to understand our fleeting existence, look no further: “Greene takes us on a journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the universe’s beginning, to the closest science can take us to the very end. He explores how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience: in story, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and our longing for the timeless, or eternal.”
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Rediscovering the small pleasures of caring
Brooke McAlary, the Australian writer who calls on us to slow down, with a new book on how to focus our caring on the people and things close to us: “By spending so much time and energy caring about the big problems of the world, we’ve lost sight of what smaller, personal acts of care can look like and just how powerful these small acts can be.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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*After standing with good posture for 10 seconds*
No, this can’t be right.
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Food for Thought
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Really enjoyed this short read on how to cultivate a curiosity for the things that algorithmic feeds can’t serve us. “Big-tech recommendation systems have been critiqued lately for their manifold sins – i.e. how their remorseless lust for ‘engagement’ leads them to overpromote hotly emotional posts; how they rile people up; how they feed us clicktastic disinfo; how they facilitate ‘doomscrolling’. All true. But they pose a subtler challenge, too, for our imaginative lives: Their remarkably dull conception of what’s ‘interesting’. It’s like intellectual monocropping. You open your algorithmic feed and see rows and rows of neatly planted corn, and nothing else.” (Possible soft paywall)
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Another really enjoyable, thoughtful read: a reflection on the impermanence of everything and how truly unique this moment in time is for our species. “A relatively stable Earth is the only one we have ever known. Every book written and read, every vegetable grown and eaten, has occurred during this short period. And on some level, Bjornerud says, it’s understandable that many of us have come to think of nature as the passive backdrop on which we live our lives. This misunderstanding is fundamentally about time: an inability to grasp the enormity of our planet’s biography.”
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You may have heard of the Dieter Rams-designed shelving system Vitsœ? Its managing director Mark Adams, who rescued the company in the ’90s, offers some great insights into the brand’s philosophy in this talk. It’s clearly filled with self-promotion, but his principles on designing products that remain valuable and desirable for decades – and thereby defy the trend towards inbuilt obsolescence – are broadly applicable and admirable.
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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The Taiwanese craftsman Yen Jui-Lin carves loveable, whimsical characters out of wood.
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Boogy Brut is an expressive serif type family with display and text option, and a wide range of ‘wild’ alternates. “Sharply modelled shapes reveal the structural qualites of the written models but do away with the handmade imperfections caused by the writing tools or the texture of the paper.”
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Classifieds
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Find a new career on the frontlines of the future with Important Jobs. Change the world in clean energy or cancer research, AI or agriculture, mental health or public health.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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Did You Know?
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In retail, the psychological effect that encourages impulse buying is called ‘Gruen transfer’.
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When you go to the supermarket to buy that one thing but leave with a whole bag full of stuff, you’ve fallen victim to the psychological phenomenon called ‘Gruen transfer’ – named after Austrian architect Victor Gruen. Malls and stores use intentionally confusing or dazzling layouts and designs to make customers lose track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to impulse buys.
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