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Work through these in order. The early ones are free and fix a surprising proportion of cases, and it is worth exhausting them before buying anything.
Free changes, in order
1. Lower your keyboard, or tilt it away from you. Most desks put the keyboard high enough that your wrists bend upward to reach it. Those little flip feet on the back of the keyboard make this worse, not better — they exist for visibility, not ergonomics. Fold them down. A negative tilt, where the back is lower than the front, is better still.
2. Stop resting your wrists while typing. Your wrists should float, with movement coming from your forearms. A wrist rest is for pauses.
3. Raise your mouse sensitivity. If you move the mouse more than about 20 cm to cross the screen, you are doing far more repetitive work than necessary.
4. Check your chair and armrest height. Armrests set too low make you lean; too high, they push your shoulders up. Either changes the angle at which your forearm arrives at the desk.
5. Move the mouse closer. Reaching out and to the side for a mouse placed beyond a full-size keyboard’s number pad is a common and entirely avoidable strain.
Cheap changes
A tenkeyless keyboard. Removing the number pad moves the mouse 15 to 20 cm closer to your body. For anyone who does not use the number pad daily, this is the highest-value cheap change available.
A larger mouse, if yours is too small. Measure your hand. A claw grip forced by an undersized mouse is a real and fixable source of tension.
Larger changes
A split or tented keyboard, a vertical mouse, or a trackball — chosen by which joint is actually bothering you rather than by category popularity.
Questions people ask
Should I use a wrist rest?
Only between bouts of typing, never during. Resting your wrist on a surface while your fingers are moving compresses the carpal tunnel at the exact moment the tendons are travelling through it. If a wrist rest helps you, it is usually because it is stopping your wrist bending upward — and the better fix for that is a lower or negatively tilted keyboard.
When should I see a doctor about this?
If you have numbness or tingling, if the discomfort wakes you at night, if it persists for more than a couple of weeks after making changes, or if there is weakness in your grip. Those are not equipment problems. Numbness in particular is a nerve symptom and belongs with a clinician rather than a shopping list.
Do compression gloves or braces help?
A night brace that keeps the wrist neutral while you sleep has reasonable support for some conditions, because many people sleep with their wrists sharply bent. Daytime braces during typing are more questionable: they restrict movement, which shifts load elsewhere. Neither is a substitute for changing what caused the problem.
