"Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting … We are sitting ourselves to death."
Dr. James Levine, quoted in Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World
Sitting is the new smoking.
As a doctor, working in primary care and family medicine, I see the consequences of inactivity all the time. The list of problems that could be eased from being more active is long: tension headaches, depression, asthma and other lung problems, any stress-related condition. Those are just a few.
And, for all the medicines in the world, changing your lifestyle is the most effective way to manage a huge proportion of the problems dealt with by family doctors.
A worldwide study published in the Lancet in September 2017 showed reductions in death and events like heart attacks and strokes at even modest levels of exercise. It didn’t matter what you did or where you live, those findings held up across all countries. Higher levels of physical activity were even better.
For many people, the idea of getting more active remains a slightly nebulous wish, a vague goal that seems out of reach. It is tremendously difficult to change your lifestyle. Making the changes is not easy. And getting them to stick for the months and years needed to make a genuine impact is a challenge.
People are getting more overweight and that is bringing huge problems. Some of the dietary causes are still being hotly debated, but everyone would agree that we have an epidemic of inactivity. People simply don’t come close to doing enough physical activity.
One thing that the phrase ‘sitting is the new smoking’ does is give people a nudge about their behavior. Perhaps it might give you pause for thought and consider whether your lifestyle is good for your health. Actually most people need a bit more than a nudge: a sharp elbow in their ribs is often helpful. Figuratively speaking.
If you haven’t already worked it out then let me offer that sharp elbow. Get active.
Do more, move more. Find a way to integrate it into your life as a writer. If you are active, you will probably live longer. Forget about that, though, and concentrate on the immediate benefits.
There is no single better way to improve your quality of life right now.
"I'm on my butt more hours a day than I sleep."
Lynn Cahoon, The Healthy Writer survey
Specific research on sitting and physical activity
Some of the research around this can get a little confusing. This is immediately obvious when you consider a couple of jobs at the extremes of the spectrum. A coal-miner, who isn’t going to spend any time sitting down, and is highly physically active, is likely to have considerably worse health outcomes than almost anybody else. Senior executive roles where people spend their entire lives sitting down live the longest.
We need to bear in mind that health is intrinsically bound up in all sorts of other factors that include whether you work for a living, where you live, what you eat, whether you smoke, and your social and family circumstances. People like CEOs may spend a lot of time sitting but they are also likely to be non-smokers, drink moderately, and exercise regularly. All of that counteracts the sitting.
A recent academic paper looked at all the research and whittled the studies down to eight systematic reviews covering 17 studies. They wanted to establish if sitting down and being inactive caused deaths. The definition of ‘sitting’ included general sedentary behaviors such as time spent watching TV and looking at screens. The review showed that there was a consistent pattern. Sitting was related in time to the causes of death.
The conclusion was clear: sitting is killing people.
Physical activity in the modern world
We do have a bonkers relationship with activity.
We spend our lives sitting in heated boxes, barely moving a few steps from one corner of the box to another. We eat and we hardly move. Then, we will occasionally leave our boxes and get into other metal boxes that drive us around. Sometimes, we get out of those boxes and go into another heated box where we run madly on the spot or jump up and down vigorously until we are sweaty. We then get back in our boxes, first the metal ones and then back to the brick ones. We then repeat this pattern.
We need to re-think how we engage with physical activity in this kind of modern environment.
Being inactive, spending too much time sitting down, and being sedentary in general will shorten your life. It will also erode the quality of your life. This is not some abstract notion where you might increase your life expectancy by an average of a few months at best. This is quite specifically related to health problems that you will have during the course of your normal life. Symptoms you can sit and list right now.
Being more active and taking breaks from sitting was the single most common tip in the Healthy Writer survey. For many writers there is a good chance that the problems you have can be improved by being more active.
Questions:
- How many hours are you sitting every day? How has that changed in the past few months or years?
- Can you list symptoms and problems that could be related to sitting?
- Has an increase in your time spent writing made you less active?
- What have you done to counteract the sedentary nature of writing?
Resources:
- Read Chapter 2.8 to start on the path towards being an active writer.
- Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World – Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett