Bach Seat

Nilofer Merchant recently posted the article Sitting Is the Smoking of Our Generation at Harvard Business Review. In the article, Ms. Merchant argues that the amount of time spent sitting in meetings and watching TV has a negative impact on our health, akin to the preventable risk of smoking.

The author says people spend more time sitting than anything else throughout the day. She cites some statistics: “… we sit more than we do anything else. We’re averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleep. Sitting is so prevalent and so pervasive that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it. “

There are big problems caused by sitting according to the article, health studies conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around.

• After 1 hour of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90%.
• Extended sitting slows the body’s metabolism affecting things like (good cholesterol) HDL levels in our bodies.
• Lack of physical activity is directly tied to 6% of the impact for heart diseases, 7% for type 2 diabetes, and 10% for breast cancer, or colon cancer.

The New York Times reported on another study, published last year in the journal Circulation that looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11%. In that article, a doctor is quoted as saying that excessive sitting, which he defines as nine hours a day, is a lethal activity.

The author points out some trends to combat the negative impacts of sitting. The first is the mainstreaming of the standing desk. She concludes that, while it gets you off your duff, won’t help you get real exercise.

Additionally, Ms. Merchant describes a change she has made to her routine. “… I switched one meeting from a coffee meeting to a walking meeting… I now average four such meetings, and 20 to 30 miles each week.”

She also cites the work of James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis’s, book Connected. They observed that obesity spreads according to network effects; if your friend’s friend’s friend who lives a thousand miles away gains weight, you’re likely to gain weight, too. And if that extended friend also loses weight, even if you’re not in the same city, you’re likely to lose weight, too. Her goal, ” is to be someone who socializes the idea that physical activity matters, and that we each matter enough to take care of our health.”

The author says that her walking meetings had some unanticipated side benefits. She reports walking helps her listen to her participants. “… I can actually listen better when I am walking next to someone than when I’m across from them in some coffee shop. There’s something about being side-by-side that puts the problem or ideas before us, and us working on it together.”

Secondly, she reports that the meetings are more focused, because the iTimeWasters stay in the pocket, “the simple act of moving also means the mobile device mostly stays put away. Undivided attention is perhaps today’s scarcest resource, and hiking meetings allow me to invest that resource very differently.”

The authors claim that the results of these off-beat meetings are positive.  “The number one thing I’ve heard people say is “That was the most creative time I’ve had in a long time” And that could be because we’re outside, or a result of walking. Research certainly says that walking is good for the brain.”

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The author concludes that if you want to get out of the box thinking, you need to literally get out of the box.

If nothing else, when sitting for long periods, standing up every 20 minutes produces significant positive health benefits. I wrote about the link between inactivity and health back in 2009.

Do you believe that sitting to the smoking of our generation?

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.