Sitting is the New Smoking
Our lives are centered around the chair. When we eat, we sit; we work, we sit; we watch TV, we sit; we drive, we sit. Our bodies aren’t built for such a sedentary lifestyle. Our bodies are built to move.
The typical office worker may spend up to 15 hours a day sitting and 21 hours sedentary. Okay, yes, it’s hard not to sit at work — unless your company graciously invests in some standing desks. But, sitting isn’t good for our posture, our blood flow, our spine, or our heart.
I just had shoulder surgery a few months ago for a torn labrum. If you haven’t been restricted to one limb consider yourself very lucky, because ordinary tasks like putting on a shirt or tying your shoes become incredibly difficult. But, disabilities are a whole different discussion. While I was recovering from surgery and starting physical therapy, I noticed the atrophy on many of my muscle groups — my shoulders, back, arms, and legs — a reduction in my lung capacity, and a drop in my energy. Being almost completely sedentary for weeks had done a job on my body. And, I’m still in pain and recovering from it today.
So what causes the pain? Well, for me, it’s a multitude of things, but sitting is a big part of it. It boils down to the fact that I had an injury and that I chose to work in a field where most of my time is spent on a computer — for work, for research and news, and for media consumption. For me, the challenge is finding balance. While exercise doesn’t completely offset our sedentary lifestyle, it helps us stay fit and strengthen our bodies and minds. In some studies, sitting has been named the culprit for a multitude of health problems. It’s essentially the idea that a sedentary lifestyle is linked to a multitude of diseases from cancer and heart disease, type 2 diabetes and muscle degeneration. Not only does it sometimes lead to disease, but sitting for long periods of time leads to a loss of good posture, back and shoulder pain, and can actually curb your creativity. Pack Matthews touches on some of these issues:
Ultimately, the move away from jobs that require incredible physical exertion is a giant leap for humanity because workers don’t have to put themselves in detrimental situations. Workers in a service based economy tend to have a higher quality of living, higher incomes, and are more healthy overall. So as a society that runs off of service based jobs, the US has one of the most powerful job forces in the world. As we continue to move more and more towards technology, the challenge will be to design experiences that allow people to experience the world and work away from a 2-d screen. We want people to travel, to experience new things, to engage with new people, and find new ways to work more efficiently. Finding new low-stress ways to work our bodies, engage with information, enjoy media, and view our world could flip the sedentary culture on its head.
Our job as designers is to make peoples lives better, period. Our challenge is to innovate new ways to make our species less sedentary, more efficient and interconnected, all while making our bodies and minds healthier. Office culture will change to better reflect our wants and needs, and as a result, further innovation and better health will fall in line. Our bodies and our earth will thank us.
