Keeping Your Life In Balance: A Typing Tip

Studies – as well as personal experience – constantly confirm that if your life is in balance, you tend to be healthier, both physically and mentally. One of the ways to keep yourself balanced is to literally balance your brain, and get the left side and the right side communicating. This helps you be more energetic, more mentally alert, and even calmer, especially if you use a physical exercise to do the balancing. For example, when you’re walking and swinging your arms at the same tempo, you’re alternating the signals sent from your brain to your muscles from left to right in a rhythmic fashion. This rhythm, and the left-right movement, helps keep neural communication flowing steadily.

You can do the same mental balancing act by controlling the muscles of your hands and fingers when you type words that use letters that alternate between the left and right hand. To try this technique, type out the words on the following list:

audible
burials
clangor
cubicle
divisor
emblems
ensigns
fuschia
hangmen
leprosy
paisley
proviso
rituals
shrieks
skeptic
surname
visible

It probably didn’t take you too long to type that list, so you might not notice an immediate effect. Let’s move briefly towards another aspect of balance, which is making sure that you have a good amount of physical movement to offset the time you spend at the computer. Take five minutes to get up, stretch your arms up high, and rotate your head slowly back and forth to stretch your neck muscles. If you’ve got time and space, try some of the rhythmic walking we talked about above.

Now that you’ve got your body feeling more balanced and relaxed, go back to the typing exercise with this column of alternating-letter words:

auditor
bushels
clement
cuticle
durians
enamels
figment
gospels
haughty
memento
penalty
prudish
robotic
sickens
sleuths
suspend
visitor

Keep practicing with words like this, and make sure you keep a balance in your life between work and relaxation, so that your body and your mind remain sharp and you’re able to fully utilize all of the touch typing techniques you’re learning.