It's not carpal tunnel syndrome, it's stress!

In September of 2022, I noticed a painful twinge, somewhere between my right wrist and shoulder blade. I attributed it to a minor shoulder injury and ignored it. Over the next three and a half years, the minor discomfort became an on-and-off pain that would frequently become too much to ignore, sometimes even preventing me from using the arm at all.

I was thorough and proactive in my attempts to diagnose and mitigate the discomfort. I bought a copy of “It’s Not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!”, and practiced two minutes of RSI-targeting stretches several times a day. This helped for a few minutes at a time, which was a relief, but it solved nothing. I got checked out by an orthopedic surgeon (twice), had an hour’s investigation of my nervous system and muscles at a hospital, with scans and measurements of electrically stimulated tendon reflex speeds. Every examination failed to provide a diagnosis; no injury, no tension, nothing. Against my better judgement, I made weekly visits to a chiropractor, then to a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, then to an acupuncturist. No dice.

I was convinced that the problem stemmed from keyboard ergonomics. I switched to using Colemak; after a few months, I was back up to my old typing speed, but still in pain. I considered that perhaps relying on a mouse to navigate JetBrains IDEs was the cause, so I started working entirely mouselessly, using Neovim as my IDE instead. When that didn’t work, I started trying out split ergonomic keyboards, building custom mounts for them to have my arms in optimal ergonomic position. This also didn’t do anything to improve my discomfort.

This culminated in the most stress-filled period of my life at the start of 2026; I’ll omit the details of my job at the time, but suffice to say the company did not handle the agentic coding transformation in a healthy way, and I found myself working more hours than ever, losing sleep, and frequently losing function of my arm. Simultaneously, my application for permanent residence in Denmark was still in processing, and quitting would have put both the application and my residence in jeopardy. There were, at this point, several days where for most of my waking hours, my right arm was in a decent amount of pain, and difficult to use, even to the point that pushing through the discomfort would still leave me unable to type on my fancy custom split Colemak keyboard.

It’s been four months since my residence permit was approved. I found a great new job, and my arm feels much better than it has in years. I’m now in a much healthier workplace, and while the new job, rollercoaster world of tech, and one-year-old at home all keep me extremely busy, I’ve never been less stressed. Even when I’ve spent an evening hacking with my laptop resting on my supine chest and arm squished in the couch cushion, my arm feels fine. Some arm tension still persists, and on the wrong keyboard, my pinky fingers can get overworked. I do suspect that my pains have a physical root cause, and that my stress symptoms exacerbate them from occasional irritations to incapacitating pains.

Of course, I had considered that my troubles might be largely psychosomatic in nature, but the stories of programmers plagued with hand pain are so numerous that it seemed far and away most likely that I was just a victim of the same condition. I wonder now how many of these stories are in fact rooted in stress, and not (solely) physical causes.

I’m also grateful to myself for having gone down the ergonomics rabbit hole. While it didn’t cure me of my stress-induced woes, I do prefer typing on a split keyboard, I do enjoy using the Colemak layout, and I really do love Neovim. I’d like to think the experience has made me a better developer and left me in a better position for a career of pain-free desk work, but that’s a train of thought for another blog post.

It is my wish that this anecdote reaches some other stressed-out typist with a mysterious pain, and brings them some hope that their condition is not permanent.