Solutions
Why Do We Need Them?
The average American sits 13 hours per day; 86 percent of Americans sit all day at work and 68 percent hate it.1 The health and psychological harm of excess sitting is indisputable. So why the status quo? Why are Americans and the majority of people in the developed world stuck on their bottoms? Why is Western society chair addicted?
There is an extraordinary paradox about lethal sitting. If sitting is so bad for our bodies, brains and souls, surely the solution is simple: get up. But whenever I talk to my patients about the idea of decreasing their sit time by 2 hours and 15 minutes each day, they are overwhelmed by the challenge. However, we know from the science that (a) people can, without changing their environment or job description, get up and move for 2 hours and 15 minutes more than before and (b) the natural human capacity to move is twice as much as even active Americans move.2 We can do it.
If sedentariness is so dangerous and reversing it is so easy, surely we should have solved the problem by now. That is the paradox; what seems so straightforward—getting up—is in reality hard. Escaping the chair sentence requires the invention and validation of effective chair-escape solutions.
The NEAT lab has tested hundreds of solutions to reverse lethal sitting. But for any human being, there is a moment of truth—where each person has to decide between two courses of action. One way keeps you in your chair. The other way is to take the necessary risk and get up.
The ground beneath the four legs of our chairs feels firm—solid, secure. But it is not. Society is fundamentally ill at ease. Go into any office with its hundreds of chair-containing cubicles and you can sense the malaise. The ground beneath our chairs is rumbling. Before we can resolve sedentariness and escape the chair sentence, we must look deep beneath the foundations—not society’s but our own.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves Are Not Necessarily True
Throughout our lives, we invent a voice in our heads that talks to us all day long. The stories I tell myself are often untruthful. Just recently I told myself I could never learn to bake bread; I was wrong. It was dead simple.
Often clients battling obesity tell themselves that they are unattractive and unworthy; the data suggest they tell themselves this many times each hour.3 This continuous internal narrative can be positive as well; however, most people criticize rather than praise themselves.
Culture dramatically impacts the voices in our heads. Much of our internal storytelling is based on stories pulled from generations before us. In Japan, for example, people’s internal voices have a far more Japanese cultural feel than do those of Japanese people living in the United States.4 When I was working with children who had been forced into prostitution in Mumbai, they told me about how they create stories about alternate lives that fill their heads. These inner voices separate them from the horror of their reality. We each have an internal voice; it is a part of being human. So, like our clothing and cooking, these internal voices are impacted by the environment in which we exist.
Inside the American Head
An important part of the American inner voice is a story we create regarding what happiness is—what we should aspire to. In the internal American voice—the voice inside our collective head—“wealth” and “happiness” are synonymous. Implicit in that narrative is that winning (wealth and success) means beating out the competition. Winning is drilled into us in preschool.
I remember the intensity of the many years my daughter spent in competitive gymnastics from the age of ten on. Training was compulsory three times a week, meets were held around the country and the only goal was to win. In the broader US society, winning is the goal. Winning is success. Success is money. Money is happiness. The American economy is based on a money-is-happiness mentality: Shop till you drop, no end to spend, the winner gets stuff.
A professor who teaches consumerism and marketing explained to me that the art of marketing is to connect the buying of an object to mortality. Car advertisements, for example, often show high-speed drives or family groups—in different ways, both allude to our mortality.
Inside the collective American head, owning objects correlates to living, so owning more possessions correlates with prolonged life—consumerism becomes the elixir of living. The most successful people are the richest, and so potentially live the longest. This idea extends beyond theory—rich people generally do live longer because they have better healthcare and health-promoting facilities. However, a part of winning is that somebody else has to lose. In order to be the best, you have to beat out someone else. Inevitably winning is isolating—it is all about getting to the top. The trouble is, the top is a lonely place.
Tribal Living
There is a Native American story about a tribe. The tribe functioned well; hunters hunted, gatherers harvested, explorers explored and homemakers managed homes; the elderly, sick and children were cared for. There was enough for everyone. One day the number one hunter thought to himself, “I am the best hunter. I kill the most. Why should I share my bounty with everyone else?” And so number one hunter built himself a hut on top of a mountain and kept everything he caught for himself.
Soon other hunters followed suit, and one after another went to live alone at the top of mountains. The tribe could not carry on; the elderly and the sick soon perished, and the homemakers and children had to flee.
But here is what happened to the hunters living on the mountaintops. Number one hunter gorged himself and gained so much fat he could no longer hunt. He died of sickness—the medicine man had left long ago. Other hunters, without craftspeople to make their spears and arrows or the value of shared knowledge, were not as skilled as they thought and soon failed. They died hungry.
The tribe exists as much for the strong as for the weak. The need for excess serves no one. In native cultures, people who live in spaces larger than they require are viewed as having a spiritual disorder akin to madness.
Plato described the essence of society as being the need to acquire a critical mass of people and then to develop a cohesiveness based on reciprocity of skills (e.g., a doctor) and allocation of tasks (e.g., security duty) among different people. Interestingly, this societal cohesiveness occurs in the animal world.
I used to live in rural Minnesota. As winter froze in, I would watch the flocks of birds fly out. It intrigued me as how they seem to all know which way to swerve and turn, hundreds of birds together. What actually happens is that within a single wing beat, birds adjust their flights to follow the flock. If you watch a flock, you will never see one bird fly away by itself; they’re always together. They never go so fast that one will be left behind, and they never go so slow that they freeze in the Minnesota winter. Think of families of penguins, schools of fish, beehives and ant mounds, and communities of chimpanzees. Cohesiveness is in living beings’ DNA. If the DNA of all these species is encoded to purposely retain connectivity as a group, so too must the DNA of humans. Humans are built to cluster together.
Millions of humans sit in chairs all day long in order to be as monetarily productive as possible. Advertisements that prod our sense of mortality collectively seduce us to buy unnecessary objects. The bitter irony is that we have put our mortality on the line by sitting for long enough to buy these objects. These chairs we sit on, alone and lonely, for 13 hours a day are killing us!