Comfortable Chairs and the Purpose of Sitting
By Turner Osler
No one wants to be uncomfortable, and especially not for long periods of time. So it’s hardly surprising that when it comes to sitting, the activity that consumes most of our waking hours, the question of “comfort” comes up immediately and just won’t go away.
But “comfort” when sitting is likely a more complicated concept than simply the absence of pain; indeed, comfort is probably more than just one thing.
One idea of comfort seems to be the absence of any muscular effort, a concept that leads to a new sort of “chair” pictured above, one that resembles what most of us would recognize as a bed.
Such sitting options are now for sale, but, for most of us, this won’t be a helpful solution: too expensive, too intrusive, and, well, just a little too weird.
While the “chair as bed” may be a non-starter, it can serve as a valuable thought experiment. Is it true that the purpose of a chair is to extinguish all muscular effort? If so, well, chairs with foot rests, arm rests, back rests, head rests, etc. seem like the obvious solution: the more rests, the more restful.
But is rest really what chairs are for? Actually, isn’t that what beds are for? Yes, there’s a crossover category, the recliner, which seems like just the thing when relaxing in front of the television or listening to music, but the recliner makes more interactive activities difficult or impossible, so it’s often not the best choice, and certainly not the best choice if there’s work to be done.
As an alternative to “complete physical relaxation” as the definition of comfort, perhaps a better definition of comfort would be “sitting in the best posture for the task at hand”. In this view the most important function of a chair is to help one find and sustain such a posture. Note that this posture can change minute to minute or even moment to moment, which makes this a big ask of one’s chair because it requires your chair to change with you as you make constant subtle changes to your posture.
A changeable chair? Yes, called active chairs, these chairs adapt in real time to your postural changes and in so doing encourage sitting in a balanced posture.
Of course, active sitting necessarily involves some muscular activity, but this small investment can pay big dividends in terms of both comfort and productivity. And it turns out that even a little muscular activity (AKA exercise) provides a range of important metabolic benefits, benefits that may actually extend one’s life span.
Productivity? Metabolic benefits? Longer lifespan? Come on, really?
Indeed. There’s a good bit of epidemiological work that confirms that sitting passively shortens our lives by as much as two years. And there’s experimental work that shows active sitting increases basal metabolic rate by about 20% or 30%, enough to raise heart rate just a bit and improve serum markers of metabolic health. I wrote a short book on the metabolic consequences of passive sitting, entitled Sit Better. If you’re interested, you can buy it on Amazon or just download it here:
