RSI Nearly Ended My Career. Here's What I Changed.

I didn't take the first warning signs seriously. A tightness in my right forearm after long writing sessions, some numbness in two fingers by the end of the week. I bought a wrist rest, took more breaks, told myself it would pass. It didn't.

Six months later I was seeing a physiotherapist twice a week and had been told that if I didn't change my input habits significantly, I was looking at a long and uncertain recovery. I write for a living. That was not an abstract risk.

What RSI Actually Does

Repetitive strain injury is not a single condition. It's a family of overuse injuries affecting muscles, tendons, and nerves in the hands, wrists, forearms, and shoulders. The most common versions among keyboard users are carpal tunnel syndrome, which involves compression of the median nerve at the wrist, and tendinopathy, which involves inflammation of the tendons.

Both develop gradually. By the time most people notice persistent symptoms, the underlying damage has been building for months. That's what makes early prevention so much more effective than treatment.

The core problem is cumulative load. Any single hour of typing is fine. Ten hours a day, five days a week, for years, is not fine for a significant portion of people. The load accumulates faster than the tissue repairs.

The Changes That Mattered Most

My physiotherapist gave me a framework: reduce total hand load, distribute what remains, and strengthen the supporting structures.

Reducing total hand load meant finding ways to accomplish the same work with fewer keystrokes. Voice dictation was the single largest change I made. I started using VoiceInk to handle all first-draft writing, emails, notes, and anything else that was primarily text generation. Those tasks make up the majority of keyboard time for most knowledge workers. Moving them to voice cut my daily typing volume roughly in half.

Distributing the remaining load meant switching to a vertical mouse, remapping frequent shortcuts to reduce finger extension, and using text expansion for phrases I typed repeatedly. None of these alone were dramatic. Together they meaningfully reduced the specific strain patterns that had caused the injury.

Strengthening came from physiotherapy exercises targeting the forearm flexors and extensors. These are not exercises most people do voluntarily. They're not interesting. They made a real difference.

Learning to Dictate While Injured

Starting voice dictation while your hands hurt has a specific challenge: you're learning something new at the same time you're managing pain and stress. The temptation is to push through on the keyboard because it's familiar, especially under deadline.

I got around this by treating dictation as the default and typing as the fallback, rather than the other way around. Any time I was about to type something longer than a short reply, I stopped and dictated it instead. The friction of remembering to switch was high at first. After about two weeks it became automatic.

Accuracy with VoiceInk was high enough that correction time was minimal. That mattered a lot. If I'd been fighting the tool on top of everything else, I might have quit.

What Recovery Actually Looked Like

I want to be honest about this: the injury took about eight months to resolve fully. There was no quick fix. What changed during that time was that I stopped making it worse, which let the slow repair process actually work.

I also came out of it with a workflow that I've kept even now that I'm fully recovered. Dictating first drafts is faster than typing them. Dictating emails is faster than typing them. The ergonomic improvements were initially defensive. They turned out to be genuine productivity improvements too.

If You Have Early Symptoms

Don't wait. The gap between early discomfort and serious injury is not as wide as it feels. See a physiotherapist, not just a GP. The specific nature of the strain matters for treatment.

And look at your input methods honestly. If you're generating thousands of words a day by typing, that load is real and it compounds. Voice dictation won't feel natural immediately, but it's learnable, and your hands will thank you for trying.