Transcription
Translator: Hani Eldalees
Have you ever closed your laptop at the end of a long day and felt like you barely had enough energy to crawl to the couch to scroll through your phone or watch a show? Or maybe both at the same time? Yeah. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this was all I wanted to do, and I couldn’t understand why. I was safe and healthy, so why didn’t I want to close my laptop and dance around the room? Where did all my energy go?
I’m a journalist. My beat for the last 10 years has been trying to understand how our tech habits are changing us as people, so I decided to find out why sitting in front of screens, because we’ve all heard about the mental effects, right? But what about our physical health? Well, as I quickly learned, looking at screens hasn’t just reshaped our days, it’s reshaping our bodies.
According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, every day, the average 19-year-old moves as much as the average 60-year-old. Over the last 20 years, type 2 diabetes rates in young people have doubled. Three out of four American adults have a chronic disease. Many of these diseases are preventable. At least one chronic disease. And the World Health Organization says this is a global problem. They predict that by the end of the decade, which isn’t far away, this lifestyle is likely to lead to 500 million new cases of preventable conditions like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, costing governments $27 billion a year.
Typing, swiping, scrolling, sitting. This is the rhythm of our modern lives. I don’t know about you, but I can’t get off my phone, I can’t get offline. So how can we stay connected without slowly destroying our health? This was the question on my mind when I stumbled upon this man.
Keith Diaz is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and he’s spent his entire career trying to figure out the minimum amount of movement that protects us from the risks of prolonged sitting, and in 2022, he published a small study that gives us a fantastic idea. He found that just five minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes had dramatic effects. It lowered blood sugar and blood pressure. And in another study, he found that inactive people who swapped 30 minutes of sitting for 30 minutes of movement a day could reduce their risk of premature death by 18 percent.
So maybe you’re saying, “Yeah, I exercised this morning, so I’m fine.” Or maybe you’re saying, “Oh, I’m so glad I got this standing desk.” I’m so sorry, but no. (Laughter) If you’re sitting or standing for most of your waking hours, your health is still at risk. Keith told me, “Don’t stop exercising,” but he said what you need to do is break up these long bouts of sedentary screen time. When he told me this, I said, really? For example, what big difference could these movement breaks make for someone who is relatively healthy? I decided to join the study.
So I went to his lab one day and sat and worked on my laptop for eight hours straight. The next day, I took these movement breaks every half hour or so. They checked all my vitals, and the results were actually quite extraordinary. My glucose was cut nearly in half. My blood pressure dropped by five points, and my mood was significantly better. The science was clear, but what does it matter if no one can actually take these movement breaks? It was easy in the lab; someone patted me on the shoulder and led me to the treadmill. So we decided to ask people, in real life, to see if they could do it.
We, our teams at NPR and Columbia, joined forces to create a podcast and a global clinical trial called the Body Electric study. And over 20,000 people signed up. We had to identify 20,000 people, and they could choose their movement dose, so they could move five minutes every half hour, or five minutes every hour, or every two hours. They could dance around the house, they could speed-walk calls, they could walk the dog, they could take out the trash, it didn’t matter. They just had to break it up, break up those long sitting periods. And you guys, I was so excited. I was saying we’re going to launch a movement for movement. Yeah, I have a way with words. (Laughter) But I won’t lie, those first few days were incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of intention and a little bit of rebellion. To flip a world that is literally built around screens and chairs. But when people figured it out, when they started to get those breakthroughs in their lives, they started to have breakthroughs. They told us they felt less pain. They told us they had more energy. They said they felt more positive about life in general.
Ultimately, of those who started taking movement breaks, 80 percent were able to stick with it for a solid two weeks. And yes, this was a self-reported study with a lot of highly motivated participants. Hello, public radio. But still, the data showed that the more breaks they took, the better they felt. People who got out got an extra boost. Some people lost some of that stubborn weight, and most people actually loved taking breaks. But the biggest surprise for me was that the breaks didn’t hurt their productivity. People said they went back to their desks and were able to focus, and they felt the work they did was actually of better quality.
So this research is going through the scientific process now. But Keith explained to me some of the reasons why these gentle breaks have such a big impact. So when we sit, our arteries bend at our hips and knees, kind of like a kinked-up garden hose. Blood starts to pool in our legs, and our muscles stop contracting. But our leg muscles need to move and be stimulated in order to clear fat and sugar and lower blood pressure. If that doesn’t happen, over months and over years, then those chronic conditions can start to creep in.
Then there’s our posture. Sitting compresses the diaphragm. We start to take shallow breaths. Shallow breaths mean less oxygen gets to our blood and even our brain. Less oxygen to the brain means we get tired and lose focus. Feel free to take a deep breath now if you want. And this is where screens come into play. So screens can mess with something called interoception. Interoception is your body’s way of telling you what it needs. It needs a snack, it needs to go to the bathroom, it needs to move. The more we focus on screens, the less we listen to the signals our body is sending us. Your body might be begging for a break, but what do you do? You keep scrolling through anxiety, you scroll past exhaustion. This can ultimately lead to burnout, yes. And again, those chronic conditions.
So how can you start to make a change to feel better? Well, first think about your most sedentary times and then make yourself a mantra. So as if you’re a student, you might say, “I’ll take an extra lap around the quad before class instead of checking TikTok, so I arrive to class with more oxygen in my brain and I can actually focus.” Or if you’re working from home, you might decide that on long Zoom calls, “I’ll pace myself for glucose management and avoid the crash that happens post-meeting.” If you’re a parent, you might say, “I’ll do one lap around the soccer field so I have enough energy to get through dinner chaos.” You can have a dance party while you’re putting leftovers in the microwave. You can walk the concourse instead of sitting and waiting for your flight. A combination of all these habits will keep your muscles active and your mood stable.
My favorite story came from a 43-year-old woman named Dana, who works in HR. So Dana had type 2 diabetes and all sorts of health problems. Her doctor told her she needed to go for a brisk walk every morning, and she was doing it, but her numbers weren’t changing. So after getting permission from her doctor, she decided to join the study. She started taking movement breaks between all her meetings, and within two weeks, she told me her blood pressure had dropped by 40 points, her cholesterol had gone down, and her doctor told her she could start reducing her insulin. She’s actually stopped taking all her daily medications. Yay, Dana, we love you, Dana. (Applause)
So we know that spending too much time online isn’t good for our mental health. But it’s not just in our heads, it’s in our bodies. We need movement to be as much a part of our lives as screens. We need our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces to give us the time and the space to just move. You can help push this reset forward. Take movement breaks. And when people look at you like you’re a weirdo, just tell them why you’re doing it. Because you just want to feel a little bit better. Ask them to put down their phones and join you. Start soon, start small. Should we start now? Yes, can we get some music? You can do this — you can do the march. You can do the hustle. Little hands in the air, if you can’t get up. Feel it. You are alive. You are alive. I love you guys. (Cheers and applause)