13

Get Up!, Step 1

Get Personal!

Having a chairless office, home or school helps only if you get up.

If I have not convinced you of the harmfulness of sitting, you must be in denial or seduced beyond sense by your chair. Getting off your bottom is a simple matter—you can do it right now! But changing sitting behavior long term is a greater challenge.

Over the next few chapters, I am going to share with you some of the secrets of how to escape lethal sitting and so win the war against The Chairman. These chapters are not meant to be a step-by-step manual, but I hope the concepts will help.

The first step is to appreciate that in the same way the chair sentence is a personal affliction, so too must be the solution. There are only three reasons a person does something: the cue, the response and the reward.

The cue is the stimulus to do something; you might not think you want a piece of candy until somebody offers you one. The response is something you’ve learned to do; when somebody offers you the candy, you reach out, take it and say thank you. The reward is the sweet taste in your mouth, the sugar high and also perhaps a memory from childhood when your dad gave you a candy.

The Triad of Human Behavior

With sitting, the cues are everywhere. We are drenched in sit cues: “Come and sit down.” There are chairs everywhere. But the cues to sit are more profound than the simple availability of chairs. Human functioning has become chair-based; you cannot keep your job unless you sit in front of the computer screen all day. You cannot socialize on Sunday with your friends unless you join them on the sofa to watch football. You cannot have friends at school unless you play video games in the basement. Rather than cooking together, we get drive-through meals together.

Because the cues to sit are so ubiquitous, it is easy to understand that the response “I’ll sit” is inescapable.

The reward system for sitting all day long is equally overt. Broadly speaking, rewards that excite people feed into one of their three primal drives: money, sex and power. And so the hedonist’s behavioral cycle is set—sitting begets pleasure, so we sit more.

Ultimately every behavior you participate in is your own. Of course, constraints are placed on us much of the time, but how you respond—your behaviors—is up to you.

Make Sense

By now you should recognize that the chair-based lifestyle we have gravitated to has hurt not just our bodies but our minds and spirits as well. Getting up from a life of sedentariness is akin to leaving a mind-numbing prison.

The chair-based existence is essentially one of sensory deprivation. Seated all day and all evening, we deprive ourselves of organic smells, three-dimensional sights, live sound, home-cooked tastes and human touch. Experiments performed in light-deprived cats demonstrated that the structure and function of cats’ brains contracted with sensory deprivation (chapter 3). This must also be true in humans who spend a lifetime sitting. And so, as we begin to walk again, it is necessary to (1) control the stimuli we expose ourselves to, (2) alter our responses to chair-based cues and (3) ensure that rewards we strive for are valuable enough to us.

Chairs Are Mass Produced But People Are Not

If I could describe myself as having four traits, I would relate one to each of my four grandparents: scientist (Grandpa Poppa), nurturer (Grandma Jesse), educator (Grandpa Danny) and artist (Grandma Gags). I did not select these four elements; rather, they are part of my DNA. Our personalities are imprinted by about the age of two. Just like our physical features, they define who we are.

Lessons for the Soviet Military

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, working in the 1890s at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg, was the Soviet Union’s father of modern psychology. He was also Professor of Pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy where the Soviet military machine was investing heavily in understanding the psychology of soldiers. According to the Academy’s research, each person had one of 16 distinct personality types imprinted from birth.1 The Soviets viewed understanding a soldier’s personality type as critical to how a person was effectively deployed in a military organization. To illustrate the importance of these personalotypes, as I call them, let’s examine two: Heroic Risk Taker and Calm Organizer.

If the military objective is to take a bridge during a battle, you need to deploy a Heroic Risk Taker—someone who is courageous and prepared to go in alone and lead from the front; in this situation, the Calm Organizer would be useless.

In warfare, there needs to be a person in charge of supplies and ammunitions. This person is critical because a war will be lost if the soldiers are unfed and without bullets. You want the Calm Organizer to be in charge of supplies and ammunitions; the Heroic Risk Taker would be useless.

Personalotypes, much like the traits I inherited from my grandparents, are to a degree woven into our DNA.2 These traits follow us throughout our lives. Your personalotype may have broader implications than simply affecting your behavior; for instance, it can impact your health. Consider obesity, which has a significant genetic component3; the DNA of your personality may be the critical genetic element. Imagine that a woman’s DNA makes her a Heroic Risk Taker and that she is given a desk job in an insurance firm. Being confined to repetitive tasks—and to a chair—is contrary to the DNA of a Heroic Risk Taker. Imagine the angst she feels working in the insurance company. Not only is she not very good at her job, always arguing and somewhat disorganized, but when she gets home, her anxiety results in comfort eating and the need to escape reality through alcohol.

On the face of it, you might think that a chair sentence is perfect for the Calm Organizer personalotype. Think back to the Soviet army. Imagine the Calm Organizer carrying crates of bullets and storing them in a carefully designated part of a beautifully organized storage warehouse. Next the Calm Organizer brings in boxes of canned meat. He stacks them elsewhere and carefully records the number of boxes. In the modern office, the Calm Organizer is burning 1,500 fewer calories/day than when organizing manually; his physicality also gets pent up. Even the Calm Organizer was not designed to sit all day and slide a computer mouse around.

Lethal Sitting—Bad for Body, Bad for Mind

Imagine now, the Calm Organizer carrying a box of bullets into the warehouse. Someone calls to him, “Would you look at the map and choose a good bar for us to go to tonight?” “I’m busy. I’ll do it later,” he says.

Now imagine the same scenario in the modern insurance office. The Calm Organizer stops what he is doing, opens up Google, locates a nearby bar and emails the information to his coworker—a purposeless distraction.

Similarly, imagine our Heroic Risk Taker single-handedly capturing an enemy bridge. A friend calls out as she charges into the oncoming gunfire, “Could you choose an Italian restaurant for tonight?” The Heroic Risk Taker is hardly going to stop her assault. In the modern insurance office, the Heroic Risk Taker is already antsy—she is only too happy to embark on a purposeless distraction.

Distraction, wrote the philosopher Blaise Pascal in his book Pensées, is the source of all misery: “The reason that we distract ourselves from one thing . . . is that the present condition is inconsolably wretched.” Modern research confirms that distraction degrades happiness; purposeless distraction makes people unhappy.4

The term “multitasking” was not originally coined to describe human activities. IBM engineers invented the word to describe the capacity of a modern computer to conduct multiple tasks simultaneously. Isn’t it ironic that modern human beings are described as multitaskers? Try this: At the same time, rub your tummy and hammer a nail into a wall. The human is not designed to multitask.

Modern office workers are essentially forbidden to work all morning on a single project and ignore their emails. Many modern workers continuously function in a “drop this—do that” workflow—as soon they start something, they are told to stop it. Multitasking has spread far beyond the office, however. How often have you sat down for a meal and seen people answering their texts or cell phones? Multitasking, the Harvard Business Review has reported, is associated with a drop in IQ of 11 points.5 This is the equivalent of working without a night’s sleep or working while smoking marijuana. Productivity falls by about 40 percent in workers who multitask. Is it a surprise that frenetic task chopping diminishes the product?

We each have a distinct personalotype that may explain an array of traits:

Just as people’s tastes for music, art and food vary, your personalotype will affect how your chair escape unfolds. Some people like to play competitive sports; others enjoy yoga. Some people like to train for marathons; others like to mall walk. I know a 36-year-old woman who left her cubicle job and started her own company because she felt confined, both physically and intellectually. Today this Heroic Risk Taker is happier and 30 pounds lighter. I know a 45-year-old financial services executive who constructed his own intricate treadmill desk; this highly successful Calm Organizer is happier and 25 pounds lighter. Because we are unique and glorious human creations, respect your personalotype—one chair escape cannot fit all.