Office jobs can involve long hours and stressful environments, which can ultimately lead to poor sleep, high blood pressure, headaches and even risks of diabetes and heart disease. You’ll want to look after yourself if you’re sitting at a desk all day, but it can be hard to achieve this when you have all the other stresses and strains of life to contend with.

Here are a few tips to getting your desk snacks up to scratch, and how you can avoid being a slave to your desk chair:

Eat fresh fruit

One area in which you should try and focus some of your attention in your diet. Many people will admit eating unhealthily when sat at a desk – of course mainly this is for convenience sake, as most people wouldn’t choose that diet, but just end up with being in a routine of quick grabs/desk grazing that they cannot easily get out of.

Fresh fruit is so underestimated; there are so many benefits to eating fresh fruit at your desk. Not only does it stop you reaching for foods rich in saturated fat, like crisps, or food high in sugar, like chocolate, but it can help fight off those office lurgies because fruit is packed with vitamin C. Many say that a satsuma a day can help prevent the common cold from being caught.

Fruit is also great for brain power. As Fruitful Office discovered in their great fruit experiment, 45% of staff were eating fewer unhealthy snacks when fruit was introduced to the workplace, and 81% of staff thought having fresh fruit available at their desk had “improved their quality of life at work.” One way to get fruit into your office diet is to make up a fruit salad the night before work, keep it in an airtight container, and bring it into work the next day, leaving it on your desk.

When you get a hunger pang, try dipping into the delicious fruit rather than a bag of crisps. You’ll feel alert for longer and your overall body health with thank you for it! Try mixing the fruit with nuts or yogurt if you want to change it up a bit. There are lots of combinations you can opt for, don’t be afraid to be adventurous either.

Try out those unusual exotic fruits in your supermarket. You never know, you may end up loving them! Fruitful Office also found that after fruit was introduced in the workplace, more colleagues spoke to each other and people generally became more sociable.

Get up and stretch

Fruit is important but remember to move your body every now and then too! It is hard to get any decent amount of exercise in when you’re at a desk all day, so try and stretch regularly to keep your spine aligned and your blood moving around your body. Verywell suggest neck rolls to help avoid that stiffening up many people get when they’ve been staring at their PC all day.

They also remind us not to neglect our wrists – which could suffer from carpel tunnel syndrome if left to type in the same position all day. This is a very painful condition which in some cases needs surgery – so do some wrist movements to keep them healthy.

Sleep well

Stressful office jobs require some shut down – only really achieved through a decent night’s sleep. Get in some serious shut eye by turning off your phone an hour before bed and thinking about things other than work.