Problems Of Sitting Down Too Much
You might have heard the expression that sitting down is the new smoking or something along those lines. Well, it turns out that, sitting down in the last 50 - 70 years has increased significantly, thanks to a rise in more office orientated work which promotes a sedentary lifestyle. As it turns out, excessive sitting down is actually harmful to our health in many ways.
To make you aware of how much of an issue this actually is, here are some statistics which definitely shocked me when I read them:
An average person sits down for 12 hours of the day
Since the 1950’s, sitting down and inactive office jobs have increased by 83%
A study in 2010 which included 184,190 people found that for people who spent more than 6 hours per day sitting down with low levels of physical activity, had a 71% increase in mortality.
The scary thing is that a different study showed that people who were also physically active for 5-6 hours per week and were sitting down for 5-6 hours a day, still had a 50% increase in mortality
I hope this paints a better picture of the issue at hand here, and with this I hope to inspire you to keep moving throughout your day with the best of your ability- After all we have legs for moving around and not for sitting down whole days.
Hope you find this one interesting 💛
5 HEALTH RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH EXCESSIVE SITTING DOWN
Poor posture and muscles stiffness
When we sit for prolonged periods of time, we put more stress on our spine and other joints which can over time lead to back pain as well as a poor posture, since the more we sit, the more likely we are to start slouching. With this in mind, sitting down also makes our shoulder and neck muscles feel stiff and inflexible, often because our head is slightly tilted down in order to look at our computer screens.
Furthermore, excessive sitting down decreases lower body strength as well as a general decline in endurance. This is due to the fact that when we sit, we place more strain on our spine which over time reduces our spine flexibility. This indirectly deactivates and weakness our gluteal muscles contributing to even more back pain and a general loss in lower body strength.
Increased weight gain
Some studies have shown a link between prolonged periods of sitting and weight gain, where some of the proposed reasons for this are that nowadays when we eat we sit down, while also being distracted with our phones, a show we are watching or someone we are talking to, causing us to often eat too much too often leading to weight gain.
Furthermore, going back as little as 100 years, humans were much more active on average than we are today, simply because work was much more physically manual instead of now when much of our work is done through sitting down based work which mostly requires our mental capacities.
Greater cancer risk
There have been some emerging studies which have suggested that prolonged sitting down can actually increase our risk of developing certain cancers such as lung, uterine and colon. However the biological reasons behind this are not clear yet and need more research, but it is interesting to see that sitting down does not only have physical impacts on our body such as muscle stiffness, but may actually affect our internal biology much more than we first believed.
More prone to heart disease
Based on science, it has now become quite clear that there is a definite link between people who spend more time sitting down and people who develop heart disease in their lifetime. Sitting down has been shown to increase our blood pressure while also altering the functioning of our blood vessels which along side the increased risk of diabetes, can actually make you much more prone to developing heart disease.
A study found that for men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching television and sitting down while doing so, had a 64% greater chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than those men who only watch 11 hours of television per week.
Higher risk of diabetes
Additionally, some studies have uncovered a rather underestimated impact of prolonged sitting which is the increase in likelihood of developing diabetes in your lifetime. A different another study found that five days of inactive bed rest was associated with increased insulin resistance which is often a precursor to developing diabetes.
HOW TO SIT DOWN LESS
Below you can find some pieces of advice which you can try incorporating into your everyday, to keep you more mobile and active even with a busy schedule:
Stand up every 30 minutes or so (setting a reminder might be helpful)
When using public transport for commuting, choose stand instead of sit
Try standing up more while talking on the phone or watching the television
If your job requires a desk, try out a standing desk which can switch between a sitting and standing position
Make use of the stairs and walk up escalator stairs
Take a short walking break every time you have a break for a coffee or lunch
Drinking more water will encourage you to move to the bathroom more often
Try some discrete sitting down strength training exercises during the hours you spend sitting down (example: sitting down leg raises)
I think it is important to raise awareness about this topic since more and more work is requiring us to spend longer hours behind computer screens and sit down more. Without realizing it, we could seriously be damaging our health here.
I hope that you take the information presented here and use it to make more informed choices about your sitting down habits, wether it be at home, work, school or anywhere else.
Thank you for taking your time to read this and I hope that you learn something new 🌟
