Tuesday, 17 March 2020
A Chair Doesn’t Have To Be Electric To Be Dangerous
Moving is good for your brain. We all know this instinctively, because of the way we just feel better after walking, dancing, playing soccer or engaging in other physical activity. But too often, we forget, because we have too much work to do, too many e-mails to answer, too many TV series to stream and so on. As a result, all too many of us end up spend all too many hours sitting every day. Scientists who study this issue use the term “sedentariness” to describe this pattern in which people remain seated and expend very little energy for long periods. And the scientists’ studies have shown that there is a meaningful distinction between how sedentary someone is and how much physical activity they engage in every day or week.
Many of us tend to think that if we go jogging twice per week, or get a lot of other exercise, we can spend the rest of our time working in front of our computers without incurring any of the risks associated with being sedentary, such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But that’s not entirely true, the specialists tell us (as does your back when you’ve spent several hours in your chair without getting up). Their research has shown that being sedentary and being physically inactive are two different things, both of which are bad. The worst case, of course, is someone who is sedentary and also does not get much exercise, and the the best case is someone who is not sedentary and also gets a lot of exercise. But in between there are the many people nowadays who engage in physical activity a few times per week but also spend a tremendous amount of time in a seated position. Recent studies have shown that staying seated for 8 hours per day inevitably has negative effects on your physical and mental health.
Inevitably, but with an interesting qualification, reported in a 2016 article published in The Lancet, entitled Does physical activity attenuate, or even eliminate, the detrimental association of sitting time with mortality? A harmonised meta-analysis of data from more than 1 million men and women. This meta-analysis found that exercise such as walking or cycling at a steady pace for 30 minutes was sufficient to offset the increased risk of mortality associated with spending 4 hours sitting. If you spend an 8-hour work day sitting, you would have to do about 60 minutes of moderately intense physical activity (activity that raises your heart rate) to realize the same compensatory effects. Interestingly, this meta-analysis found that the benefits were the same even if these 60 minutes of activity were divided into several periods over the day. Another interesting finding was that physical activity has less of a compensatory effect if you spend your sedentary time watching TV.
In 2016, a consortium of Canadian health institutions and organizations issued a set of recommendations for fighting sedentariness. They proposed a new approach that anyone can follow. It encourages any behaviour that interrupts prolonged periods of sitting and thus stimulates blood flow, the endocrine system and so on. The benefits begin with simply standing up, although they increase if you walk instead and even more if you run. For example, a 2015 study showed that two minutes per day of light activity, such as washing the dishes, could reduce the risk of death by 33% compared with people who remain completely seated every hour.
Knowing all this, the easiest decision to make to do your brain some good may not be to sign up for a boot camp at your local gym but simply to resolve to get up from your computer every once in a while and do something like stretch or take out the garbage, or hold your meetings with colleagues while walking with them in the park, or run your errands on foot or on your bike instead of in your car. Pretty soon, you’ll get into a sort of a “virtuous circle ”, because these activities will tire your body out enough that you’ll also fall asleep faster and sleep better at night (even more so if you can add, say, a half-hour of daily exercise that actually makes you work up a sweat). As a result, you’ll wake up better rested, so you’ll have more energy to move around more during the day, so you’ll sleep better at night, and so on.
Body Movement and the Brain | Comments Closed
