Can a Comfortable Chair Help You Fight Office Stress?

Could a chair really help you work better? That was the question Herman Miller set out to answer when we tapped the Texas A&M Ergonomics Center to collaborate with us on groundbreaking research that examined the effects a comfortable chair has on cognitive performance. When we typically think of ergonomics, we think of the physical aspects of how a chair interacts with the person sitting in it. But in this experiment, cognitive ergonomics became our focus—evaluating memory, attention, and cognitive flexibility (your brain's ability to easily transition between ideas or tasks)—essentially, how well a person could think in one chair versus another.