Due to extended periods of sitting, most of those who are working corporate jobs are prone to getting spider and varicose veins. Sitting for hours at a time can weaken blood circulation in your legs and create blood pools in your veins, causing the appearance of spider veins. While this is mainly just a cosmetic issue, some people are bothered by their appearance.
So how do you avoid spider veins at your office job? The simple answer is to take short breaks throughout the day and engage in activities that will counteract the blood flow disruption. This could be as simple as standing for a few minutes each hour or briefly walking to the other side of the office to get some water. The important thing is to do something that counteracts the pressure and poor blood flow that your legs experience due to excessive sitting.
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How to Avoid Spider Veins At An Office Job
While an office job will require you to be at your desk for hours on end, there are small exercises and habits you can do if you’re concerned about forming spider veins. These exercises and habits can be done without compromising your work or causing issues to the work place environment, but they’ll help stimulate blood flow and vein health to prevent faulty blood vessels targeting the core reason for spider and varicose veins. Here are just some of the things you can do:
1) Mini Desk Exercise Throughout The Day
Everyone knows that regular exercise promotes healthy blood circulation and comes with many health benefits to your blood vessels. While you may not be able to do the typical exercises like running and weight lifting at work, you can do small workouts at your desk while working.
Things like flexing your ankles to mirror the motion of walking, flexing your calves and thighs, small kicks, and anything that will engage your muscles and help vein valves boost blood flow in your legs. While this may seem like a limited form of physical activity, it should be enough to help keep your leg veins from forming a blood clot or blood pools that make varicose veins so evident on the skin’s surface.
2) Take A Walk Around Your Office Periodically
Like exercises at your desk, taking a walk periodically to the bathroom or the break room can help prevent the formation of blood clots and twisted veins. Sitting too long will not cause blood pools due to poor circulation but it will also prevent oxygenated blood from reaching your legs.
Walking won’t only relieve some of the pressure on your vein valves trying to push your blood up your legs, but it will also allow venous blood to flow to your legs. Though you can’t do this too often, once every few hours could still yield great benefits in preventing visible leg veins from forming.
3) Elevate Your Legs
While this one may be a bit trickier than walking around the office or flexing your ankles, if possible you should elevate your feet slightly above your heart line for 15 minutes during your break. With the flow of blood from your legs struggling to circulate, raising your feet for just a few minutes can help counteract the effect of sitting for too long at your office job. By elevating your feet, gravity will help blood flow from your legs back to your heart and prevent blood pools.
It has been suggested that leg elevations as a leg vein treatment should be done 3 to 4 times a day for 15 minutes to reap its benefits against spider veins. However, not all of these elevation sessions need to be done during work hours. Taking a few minutes out of your lunch break to elevate your feet then repeating the process once you get home twice more will also help prevent spider veins from forming.
4) Wear Comfortable Clothing
Though not a form of exercise, the clothing you wear can promote or impede the formation of spider veins while you are at work. Healthy veins need to be able to circulate blood effectively throughout the body and they can’t do that if they’re restricted by tight clothing. Tight clothing can cause venous insufficiency and cause blood to pool on your legs and create varicose veins. By wearing comfortable and loose clothing you will prevent any abnormal blood flow and superficial veins from forming spider veins.
You can also wear compression stockings to give your vein walls extra support throughout the day. Compression stockings are a common treatment when it comes to preventing varicose veins as they ensure you have enough support for superficial veins and larger veins found in your leg. With even weaker veins circulating venous blood effectively, it’s unlikely that spider veins will form in your leg.
Learn More: What Does It Mean When You Develop Spider Veins
Why Are You More Susceptible to Spider Veins With A Desk Job
People with office desk jobs are more susceptible to spider veins because of the excess pressure on their veins throughout the day. Sitting for several hours at a time makes it hard for blood to circulate from your legs back to your heart due to gravity pushing it down to your legs.
Though most people try to work out throughout the week, people with office jobs are sedentary throughout the day and maintain constant pressure on their veins due to the nature of their jobs. While this may not immediately cause spider veins, daily pressure like this over time can lead to the development of blood pools and clots.
What To Do If You Do Develop Spider Veins Due to Your Office Job
Though these preventative measures may help reduce your chances of developing spider veins, these exercises will not help if you already have pre-existing spider veins. They may help you from developing more, but you’ll need medical treatments to rid your legs or other parts of your body of the ones you already have.
If you’re worried about time off from work or discomfort after these treatments, there are quite a few options that you can pick from depending on the severity of your condition and the recovery time you’re willing to endure. Here are some of the treatments you can have to remove spider veins you’ve developed due to your office job:
1) Laser Therapy
Laser therapy is a minimally invasive varicose vein treatment that uses heat to treat the damaged veins and remove spider veins permanently. Through laser technology, your spider veins are targeted with heat causing them to collapse and no longer be a functional path for blood to flow through. With blood no longer passing, blood pools can no longer form, and the vein that’s no longer functional will eventually be absorbed into the body. With the veins being absorbed, the spider veins are permanently removed from the skin’s surface.
While highly effective, you will need to take 2 to 3 days to recover from the procedure and have someone drive you home. There have been cases of people returning to work on the same day but it’s highly advised against. You should fully recover in about 2 weeks after the procedure. It’s also important to note that while this procedure can remove spider veins, new spider and varicose veins can still develop in the same area down the line.
2) Vein Injections
Vein injections are similar to laser therapy in the sense that they cause spider veins and varicose veins to collapse and be absorbed into the body, though injections use a special solution to do so. The best thing about vein injections is that you can return to work right after your treatment as pain should be minimal after the procedure.
If you do experience a higher degree of pain, you may want to take a few days off but it should subside in around 48 hours at most. While you can return to your normal schedule immediately, it will take around 3 to 6 weeks to fully remove visible spider veins while larger veins will take 3 to 4 months to disappear.
Prevent and Treat Spider vein at The Vein Clinic Doctor
With many office jobs requiring you to be on your computer for hours on end, spider and varicose veins can become a real concern. Over time, the constant blood flow interruption to your legs will damage your leg blood vessels and create the appearance of varicose veins. While there are many ways to prevent them at work, it can be quite hard to completely eradicate their occurrence.
Here at The Vein Clinic Doctor, we offer expert advice on how to prevent varicose veins as well as advanced treatments that can diminish their appearance once fully formed. We have both invasive and non-invasive treatments for any venous conditions you may have. Call us today to know more about services or book an appointment online.
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